A Lord Of The Slums
Originally published December 19, 1999

Long before it was owned by the "King of Baltimore" -- before the rats moved in and the junkies bled all over the bathroom and the baby got poisoned in the parlor -- the Formstone rowhouse at 1120 N. Milton Ave. was already well on its way to rack and ruin.

It had sheltered a succession of blue-collar immigrant families through most of the century, providing them a thin slice of the American dream, until a decade ago when it fell into the hands of Pick'n Chick'n Inc. James M. Stein, proprietor.

The 42-year-old speculator has owned, rented and sold more than 1,000 rowhouses in the city over the past 15 years -- mining a personal fortune from the wreckage of the city's slums from his offices on a quaint, tree-lined stretch of Conkling Street in Highlandtown.

During that time, his properties have shown up in the investment portfolios of five convicted drug dealers, the medical records of 75 lead-poisoned children and in at least nine suspected arsons. More than 50 have been condemned as unfit for human habitation.

"The worst of the worst," declares Larry Little, chief of the city's demolition program. "Block by block, address by address, you're looking at properties that were rundown for so long that they've been stripped of any value. They're not safe for a dog to live in."

Operating in relative anonymity behind a wall of some 70 companies, Stein has benefited from an understaffed and antiquated city enforcement system that is unable to detect patterns of abuse by large-scale, corporate landlords.

But a computer-assisted analysis by The Sun of more than 10,000 pages of records from police, housing, health, tax and court agencies shows that Stein has a long history of questionable dealings that will soon be subjected to the glare of official scrutiny for the first time.

That's because he is the silent real estate partner of George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- the 30-year-old, self-proclaimed "King of Baltimore" who milled the profits from a cocaine ring into a slum housing empire that federal prosecutors are now seeking to seize.

Sentenced two weeks ago to more than a decade in prison, Dangerfield declined repeated requests for an interview. And Stein twice refused to comment about their relationship. But family, friends and former employees paint a consistent portrait of a master gamesman and his young apprentice trading on the dregs of the city's real estate market.

"Jim taught George everything he knows about the business," says Angie Jackson, 30, Dangerfield's niece and business manager. "How to set up his corporations, which lawyers to use, which inspectors to watch out for -- everything."

Before they were done, Dangerfield would be one of Baltimore's largest slumlords, enforcing his leases with paid thugs and routinely shutting off his tenants' heat when they fell behind on their rent, records show.

"He's a hero right now to a lot of the young dope hustlers," said Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III in a November interview before he left office. "But ever since we first read about this guy in the paper, a big piece of the story has been missing.

"I've been asking myself all along, how did a high school dropout learn to play the real estate market? How does a rank amateur become one of the 10 worst slumlords in the city?"

Here's how:

Dangerfield purchased a third of his portfolio of 125 rental houses on "installment" plans from Stein, paying him thousands of dollars a month toward one day owning them outright.

In the meantime, Dangerfield was free to rent out the substandard dwellings to poor families desperate for shelter -- and to plow his criminal profits into his seemingly legitimate holdings.

In the bargain, he also signed agreements that made his 24 companies responsible for all repairs, lawsuits or injuries in the often-decrepit dwellings, while Stein continued to hold the titles free of liability.

One result is that families with claims against Dangerfield might have to wait decades for relief, attorneys say, while Stein is legally free to repossess many of the houses and sell them again if he chooses.

"It may be appalling," says Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor. "But there's nothing illegal about it.

"There's nothing in our state law that says you can't sell houses to drug dealers -- unless you know you're being paid with drug money. And there's nothing preventing you from taking back the properties if the guy stops making payments while he's in prison."

Of immediate concern for federal prosecutors will be untangling the contractual relationship between Dangerfield and Stein -- and figuring out which houses Dangerfield actually owns.

"Suffice it to say that we are investigating the ownership of everything held by Mr. Dangerfield," says U.S. Attorney Lynne A. Battaglia. "And any silent partners he may have will be addressed in the appropriate manner at the appropriate time. But we have no intention of turning our back on this problem. The stakes are too high."

Just how high is only now becoming clear.

And the house at 1120 N. Milton is a good place to start.

The keys to hell

Shantell Robinson, a 24-year-old college student and single mother, knows the address well. Nearly two years after she moved out, the scars still feel fresh.

"I look back now sometimes and I realize we were lucky to get out of there alive," she says, stroking her little boy's braided hair. "I still wake up some nights, dreaming that we're back there."

Driven from her home by a fire, and unemployed at the time, she walked into Dangerfield's Estate Management office on North Avenue in May 1997, seeking temporary shelter. Her clothes smelled of smoke. Her life savings were in her pocket. And her 3-year-old son, Christopher, was squalling on her hip.

"Don't worry about a thing," she recalls the landlord telling her with a smile. "I have a place available. You can move right in."

What happened next to mother and child offers a keyhole into the chaotic world that city, state and federal officials will face in their investigation of Dangerfield's properties and his relationship with Stein.

Dangerfield showed Robinson into a rundown three-bedroom rowhouse on Milton Avenue in East Baltimore that had been illegally partitioned into a boarding house for five families.

All shared one kitchen under a caved-in ceiling and a cramped upstairs bathroom with a rotten, drafty window overlooking the abandoned 1100 block of N. Port St. Rats could be heard crawling in the walls.

For $55 a week, Dangerfield gave Robinson the keys to the front parlor.

It was a narrow room, not much bigger than the back of a bread truck, with chipped woodwork and curls of peeling paint on the ceiling that would sometimes flutter down like snow from the footfalls of the tenants upstairs.

Worse, the house was located in a small piece of hell on Earth known as "Zombieland."

The neighborhood around Dr. Rayner Browne Elementary School was a honeycomb of shattered rowhouse shells and slum rental units teeming with heroin addicts. Dangerfield himself owns at least a dozen houses there.

Outside Robinson's hollow door, dope dealers and junkies pounded up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, cursing, arguing, setting prices, paying debts, shooting up, passing out. There would be blood in the sink in the morning. And syringes on the back of the toilet.

"Please take care of this problem," Robinson pleaded two weeks before Christmas 1997 in one of many unanswered letters to Dangerfield. "This is the 5th time I have complained. My neighbors upstairs from me in 2A and 2B have people running in and out with drugs. There's blood on the floor."

And the tenants were freezing.

The furnace had broken down, and they were heating the seven small rooms by running all four burners on the gas stove around the clock, supplemented by space heaters.

It was around this time that Robinson began to notice the first signs of trouble with little Christopher.

The chilling diagnosis

A burbling bolt of energy who had begun walking and talking at an early age, the toddler suddenly seemed to be falling down a lot. He also had developed slight facial tics: a twitch around the eyes, a jerk at the mouth, small things that might barely have registered amid the day-to-day bedlam at 1120 N. Milton.

"There were nights we couldn't sleep at all," recalls Robinson. "I mean, we were tired all the time. But I had an intuition that something was wrong. Mothers just know. It was more than a lack of sleep. So I took him to the doctor.

"When they told me he was lead-poisoned, my heart just sank."

Kennedy Krieger Institute detected 35 micrograms of lead per a unit of Christopher's blood. It was 15 points above the state threshold for lead poisoning and five points below the level for mandatory hospitalization and a monthlong series of painful injections to strip the lead from his body.

"I almost threw up," says Robinson.

A bureaucratic quagmire

In the months that followed, Robinson was bombarded with information, pamphlets, phone numbers and treatment instructions from doctors, nurses and social workers. No fried foods. Wash clothes often. Mop floors daily. Wipe down walls. Scrub toys.

She was told that her son would likely suffer major learning difficulties, because lead interferes with nerve and brain functions in as little as 30 days after exposure.

Christopher would be seven times more likely to drop out of school and five times more likely to experience severe cognitive disabilities. He might suffer hearing loss. He'd have a greater tendency toward violence. He'd lag behind kids his age, maybe for the rest of his life.

"It blocks the reading and reasoning abilities of the brain," says Ruth Ann Norton of the Maryland Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. "It makes the kid less able to learn and more prone to a range of problems -- everything from speech, hearing, balance and coordination difficulties to a greater likelihood of criminal behavior.

"At levels above 35, we see kids having problems that last a lifetime."

The coalition was among the first agencies to intervene in Christopher's case, immediately arranging his enrollment in a speech therapy program at Rayner Browne Elementary after tests revealed an 18-month lag in his verbal skills.

The nonprofit group also sent counselors to the Milton Avenue house to help Robinson assess how dangerous it was.

Inside, they found serious lead hazards in nearly every room -- paint peeling from ceilings, windowsills and baseboards, lead dust on walls. Afterward, the coalition forwarded a final report to the Health Department for follow-up inspection.

Twice, beginning in September 1997, city inspectors left notices for Robinson to call and schedule a visit. Twice she called, but inspectors arrived to find her not at home. Finally, when a third attempt to gain entry failed, city inspectors gave up.

Under a policy that requires tenants complaining of lead poisoning or other housing deficiencies to personally grant inspectors access, health officials effectively shelved the warnings about the hazardous conditions at 1120 N. Milton.

The policy is designed to save the city the cost of obtaining court-ordered authorization for forced entries, but it often results in inspections being canceled altogether -- and in repeated lead poisonings at the same hazardous addresses.

"It is one of our biggest problems," concedes Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the commissioner of health. "We have 150,000 lead houses in the city and only 10 inspectors, and we're dealing with a transient tenant population that often moves before we can get into the house.

"And we have all the same automation deficiencies as the Housing Department -- the same lack of comprehensive computer databases, the same difficulties tracing corporate ownership and cross-referencing it to outstanding complaints. Most of what we do is on a case-by-case basis, which is an inadequate response when you're dealing with a large-scale property owner."

Meanwhile, students working in a poverty law clinic at the University of Maryland School of Law began looking into Dangerfield's company and quickly discovered that 1120 N. Milton was not licensed or registered as a rooming house.

And Tom Yost, a Baltimore attorney who agreed to file a lead paint lawsuit on Christopher's behalf, was bogging down in a swamp of paper.

Documents showed that the house was controlled by a corporation called India Enterprises, which had signed it over to an affiliated company known as Crucify Realty. Both were run by a third firm known as Estate Management -- which sometimes did business under the name Millennium Management.

All were held by Dangerfield.

But the only rental license on the property was held by Pick'n Chick'n, which state tax records listed as the actual owner. And Pick'n Chick'n was Stein.

Among the five companies, they had more than seven mailing addresses.

Exactly who owned the old house was difficult to determine.

Under the terms of a 1993 installment contract, Dangerfield agreed to pay Stein $103.61 a month for 15 years, after which he would assume ownership of 1120 N. Milton. In the meantime, he was free to use it "as an investment for commercial purposes," so long as he assumed all the risks.

In effect, Stein would continue to hold title and realize income from the rundown cracker box, while shouldering none of the responsibility for repairs and no liability for injuries.

"You're talking about a guy who owns 45-plus corporations, none of which hold more than half a dozen houses or so -- and none of them are worth anything," Yost says. "Then he gets another guy to stand in his place for liability purposes, which gives him another level of insulation.

"Now, we have a brain-damaged child trying to collect payments from a drug dealer who's going to prison. In the bluntest possible terms, that's the position Christopher is in."

The 'King of Baltimore'

As Christopher's lead level continued to rise through Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1997, Shantell Robinson's anxiety gave way to fear.

"Discussed housing relocation, which is of concern to mother as child's Pb [lead level] is increasing," a counselor at Kennedy Krieger wrote in November. "Mother's income only $274/month. Christopher appears to have language difficulties."

By then, records show, Dangerfield had failed to respond to at least nine letters and notices from Robinson, the coalition and the hospital informing him of the problems in the house.

A month later, exterminators from the city's Rat Rub-Out program stopped by to bait the kitchen for vermin -- notably, a large and ornery Norwegian brown that the tenants called Ben.

Three months after that, the water was turned off when Dangerfield failed to answer a demand for payment from the city for $982.80 in unpaid utility bills.

What no one knew at the time was that the landlord was more than a little distracted navigating a sea of personal worries.

He had been convicted more than 20 times of violating basic safety and health standards, records show, and was riding a virtual merry-go-round through the city's housing court after being identified as a serial scofflaw by Commissioner Henson's newly beefed up enforcement office.

"We were well aware that Mr. Stein was behind some of these addresses," recalls Denise M. Duval, chief housing prosecutor. "But he's a master at masking his ownership through corporate shells and at finding investors who are -- how should I say this? -- arguably unsophisticated enough to assume his liability.

"It puts us in the position of taking people to court who are much less skilled at working the system. People like Mr. Dangerfield."

As court-ordered repair directives continued to pile up in his black-and-gold-trimmed office at 1747-1749 E. North Ave., the "King of Baltimore" increasingly found himself in paint-spattered jeans with a hammer in his hand.

Family members -- led by the landlord's father, a retired postal worker -- chipped in to help stave off the city's enforcers.

"Between the inspectors and the bill collectors and all the repairs, the money was going out of one pocket as soon as it came into the other," recalls Jackson, who left a position as a state correctional officer to help manage her uncle's foundering business.

Then, in April, one month after the city cut off the water to 1120 N. Milton, Dangerfield found himself surrounded by police and federal agents on the Baltimore Beltway as he entered the final leg home from a trip to New York City.

The officers had their guns drawn. A helicopter flew overhead. Police dogs barked nearby. They had been waiting for him.

"Keep your hands on the wheel!" they told him. "Make no sudden movements!"

With that, police dragged the president of Estate Management Inc. from his Audi sedan and handcuffed him on the side of the road. From the passenger seat, they seized a suspicious satchel. Inside was a half-pound of cocaine.

The case was what prosecutors call a "slam dunk."

Detectives had been listening to Dangerfield's conversations on the phone for months under a court-ordered wiretap -- linking him to a drug ring that employed more than a dozen convicted felons as runners, enforcers and collectors.

Police had also made three "controlled buys" of cocaine from the slumlord through confidential informants.

In his pin-striped gangster suits and two-tone shoes, his white Humvee and his Roman script tattoos, Dangerfield "styled" like a slightly updated Roaring '20s mobster. Tack on an earlier conviction for drug dealing in 1995 and his inventory of slum houses, and he looked every inch the high-flying dope tycoon.

It is a view that his family disputes.

"The reason George got so much attention was because of all these rundown houses," Jackson insists. "But nobody ever stopped to ask themselves, what are these places worth?

"And to this day, I never heard anybody say a word about Jim Stein's part in all this. He totally took advantage of the situation. It wasn't George who ran these houses into the ground. It was Jim Stein -- and he gets to walk away without a scratch."

Rotting investments

The past decade has not always been easy for the owner of Pick'n Chick'n Inc.

Beginning in his 20s as a self-made real estate investor, Stein got an early boost in 1984 when he persuaded three Baltimore savings and loans to lend him seed money to buy a sprawling collection of rental houses from the Morris B. Goldseker Foundation, records show.

Lauded in business circles during his lifetime as a frugal and farsighted investor, Goldseker was known in the African-American community as one of the worst slumlords in Baltimore and the owner of a vast portfolio of substandard housing.

Estimates of his holdings at the time of his death in 1973 ranged to well over 1,000 housing units held in more than 50 companies.

In little more than 10 years, his heirs would sell off the assets -- including at least 31 dwellings where children had been lead poisoned -- for about $26 million, forming one of the city's richest philanthropic trusts.

At the age of 27, Stein purchased 121 of the houses for $1.9 million, an average of $15,700 per rowhouse, that would serve as collateral for the purchase of hundreds more properties over the years, deed and mortgage records show.

Among the Goldseker houses Stein bought were at least three where children had been poisoned by lead during the preceding decade.

Beyond the potential lead liability, it was an inopportune time to be acquiring property in certain areas of Baltimore.

"You look at the history of these neighborhoods and you'll see that the crack cocaine just lit up this town around that time," recalls Robert L. Langston Sr., 47, a lifelong city resident, carpenter and handyman who worked on Stein's houses for 15 years.

"There was so much killing and drugs and carrying on that decent people couldn't live in them neighborhoods no more, and it got real hard for the landlords to find any kind of good tenant. But Mr. Stein also owned some of the worst houses in the city, no getting around that."

Stein's addresses would ultimately accumulate more than 200 violation notices for housing and health code deficiencies: faulty wiring, rotted window frames, leaky roofs, abandonment and lead hazards.

"I know," says Langston, who bought four of the units from his former employer, only to abandon them when the maintenance costs bankrupted him in 1998. "I made a living most of my life doing nothing but answering housing notices for Mr. Stein."

Declining fortunes

By 1996, records show, Stein's fortunes -- both in business and in his personal life -- were faltering.

In addition to the constant barrage of violation notices, his Goldseker loans had come due, and he was embroiled in no fewer than 14 lawsuits with disgruntled investors, former partners and tenants.

His wife of 13 years filed for divorce after he was convicted in May 1995 of soliciting oral sex from an undercover police officer posing as a hooker along Patterson Park.

"I usually pay $20," Stein told Officer Karla Lerner, after parking his Mercedes-Benz coupe in an alley behind Trinity Lutheran Church, records show.

In the bitter parting with his wife that followed, Stein was forced to liquidate his $750,000 custom-built home in Lutherville.

He also ceded to his wife a Mercedes-Benz sedan, $300,000 in cash, his exclusive rights to the family's country club membership, $19,000 a year in child support and more than $50,000 for his two children's tuition at a private academy.

Further, the divorce forced him to reveal publicly the extent of his rental holdings as of Sept. 11, 1997.

In a fluid portfolio of corporations through which he had churned more than a thousand properties, Stein had at least 449 lots on hand at that moment. And 40 percent of them were sheltered in a trust fund in the names of his 10-year-old sons.

Left unaddressed by the settlement agreement: Many of the houses sitting on top of those lots were a shambles.

Under Maryland law, landlords can retain ownership of the ground beneath a house -- and collect annual rent payments on it -- while selling the house itself through "lease-to-own" or "installment payment" contracts that leave tenants or investors responsible for its upkeep.

Originally conceived as a means of lowering purchase costs for working-class homebuyers, "ground rents" are now routinely exploited by slumlords as a means of severing their ties to decrepit houses while still collecting income from unwary buyers.

Even outstanding violation notices for serious deficiencies such as lead hazards or unstable roofs can be "signed over" to the buyer.

In a city known for its aged and often dangerously substandard dwellings -- the eighth-oldest housing stock in the nation -- local health and safety laws do not require that outstanding code violations be repaired before a property is sold.

Further, if the buyer stops making payments for any reason, landlords are free to take back the house and sell it again, secure within a corporate shell that protects their personal fortunes in the meantime.

"If the house falls down on somebody's head, the best the victim can do is sue the company, which usually doesn't own anything except a few more slum houses that aren't worth a quarter," says Anne Blumenberg, an attorney for the nonprofit Community Law Center.

"Meanwhile, the landlord is out on his yacht in the Chesapeake Bay, wrapped in a cobweb of corporations, counting his bag of money. It's a system you won't find in many other places, and it promotes predatory patterns and practices by landlords -- not to mention some fairly bizarre ownership scenarios."

Twists and turns

In the annals of such seemingly unlikely tales, few are as curious as the story of Stein's association with two young drug dealers and a pair of decaying rowhouses near Greenmount Cemetery.

At 23, Angelo R. Garrison looked like a rising star in Baltimore business -- the up-by-the-bootstraps owner of a west-side hair salon. The president of Angelo Inc. also controlled a small but growing catalog of eight rental houses.

Then the shooting started.

On the night of April 8, 1993, Garrison and his 3-year-old son were mowed down outside his office in the 200 block of Park Ave. by a gunman working for one of the most violent heroin gangs in West Baltimore.

The toddler was shot between the eyes as he licked an ice cream cone in the back seat of his father's Volvo.

Garrison, hit all over, fell to the pavement like a rag doll at the feet of his girlfriend. In the front seat, his younger son sat screaming, miraculously spared from the clawing bullets.

The killings flared in the news media for weeks, making front-page headlines and sensational television news. Garrison, it was reported, was himself a paroled drug dealer.

What few knew at the time was that Garrison was a lieutenant in the drug organization of imprisoned heroin kingpin Melvin "Little Melvin" Williams, court records would later reveal.

And Garrison was about to be indicted for selling 2 ounces of heroin and cocaine to an undercover federal agent after bragging that "he could obtain kilogram quantities" for future deals, court records show.

At the time of his death, Garrison was also suspected of laundering drug money through Angelo Inc. as part of a scheme by the Williams gang to deposit dope dollars in banks disguised as sales receipts from legitimate companies.

Williams himself was president of a corporation called Scrapp Inc. that owned a towing garage, an auto supply store, a nightclub, a carwash, an apartment building and a dozen rowhouses.

Federal prosecutors later seized his nightclub Underground on Edmondson Avenue after discovering that the labyrinth dance hall doubled as a bootleg dispensary -- where the profits from beer, wine and liquor sales were freely mingled with illegal drug proceeds.

U.S. Attorney Battaglia confirmed that prosecutors are still investigating at least five rowhouses that Williams transferred to family members through Scrapp Inc. As for Garrison's eight houses, they evaporated from his portfolio four months after his death, before federal agents ever had a chance to investigate them.

"I had hoped my other son might have been able to get some benefit from those houses -- sell them, rent them, do something with them," recalls Monica McNutt, 28, the mother of Garrison's two children. "But when I looked into it, I found out they were gone. There was nothing left.

"The guy he bought them from just reached out and took them back."

Deed records show that Garrison had purchased the eight dwellings on installment contracts from a string of companies named after U.S. cities: Albany Realty, Frankfort Realty, Topeka, St. John and Trenton.

James M. Stein, proprietor.

On Aug. 24, 1993, Stein filed papers in the sixth-floor deed room of the Circuit Court building on Calvert Street, taking back the properties after the late Angelo Garrison stopped making payments.

Fifteen months later, on Nov. 14, 1995, Stein resold two of the addresses -- a pair of red brick rowhouses at 1430-1432 N. Aisquith St. on the edge of a bullet-pocked crack bazaar near Greenmount Cemetery where at least eight drug murders and scores of internecine shootings had littered the streets with spent brass.

One of the dwellings had been under an outstanding violation notice from the city Housing Department for more than a year for a broken sewer pipe, rotted window frames and a crumbling tar roof.

The sale price: $18,073.60.

The buyer: a company called EAD Management.

The president: George A. Dangerfield Jr. -- "The King of Baltimore."

Four years later, repairs have yet to be made, housing records show.

The terrible cost

The Aisquith Street deal was part of a package of 12 slum houses that Stein sold to Dangerfield in just 48 hours -- including a $63,000 cluster of 10 units on Federal Street, where Stein had been cited at least four times for lead paint hazards.

One of those houses had been under a lead violation notice for four years, after the poisoning of a child there in 1991. Rather than make the repairs, Stein boarded up the doors and windows of 408 Federal St. and left it vacant until he sold it to Dangerfield.

In what anti-lead activists call a glaring gap in the law, city ordinances "deactivate" such notices as long as landlords leave their hazardous properties unoccupied -- or if they sell them to a new owner.

In Dangerfield's case, he was hit with a new lead notice at the property on Sept. 6, 1996, when Health Department inspectors learned of the sale and prohibited him from using it as a rental property until he refinished the interior.

Three years later, the two-story hulk squats with its front windows blown out, streaked with mildew and graffiti and heaped with trash like a relic from a long-ago war.

It was one in a series of difficulties involving some 35 addresses that Dangerfield eventually bought from Stein after a chance meeting at a real estate auction in 1989.

"Jim pretended to be George's friend," says Jackson, shaking her head. "He borrowed the Humvee to take his kids to the beach. He had George over to his place for dinner. He gave George referrals for carpenters and electricians. He told him how to handle himself in court.

"But when George got into trouble with the houses Jim sold him, he wouldn't return our calls."

And the troubles were considerable.

In all, 33 of the dwellings would be cited for violations of city health and safety codes by 1999, records show, contributing to Dangerfield's 23 housing convictions. Three of the houses would be condemned as unfit for human habitation -- including one on Biddle Street in such bad condition that city wrecking crews demolished it overnight.

Ultimately, nine more children would be poisoned by lead.

Together with Stein's 75 prior cases, it brings to 84 the number of children poisoned at addresses owned by Dangerfield and his silent partner.

"If that many kids were hurt in an industrial accident, there would be a revolt in this town," says Norton of the anti-lead coalition.

"It translates into literally millions of dollars in medical expenses, remedial programs, special education, court costs, you name it. And because these kids are from poor families, it's the public -- not Dangerfield and Stein -- who will wind up paying those bills."

Back in Zombieland, other costs are more apparent and more immediate.

As part of an urban renewal campaign to demolish or renovate 1,000 houses in the east-side slums, a nonprofit group known as the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition has been compiling a list of houses in the area for the past two years.

On that list are some 195 dwellings that have moved through Stein's portfolio over the past decade.

Nearly one-third -- 62 rowhouses -- now stand vacant or abandoned.

Nine have been demolished by the city.

Another nine are slated for probable demolition.

And 20 are awaiting prosecution for long-term code violations, including 12 that have been cited repeatedly in recent years.

"There's four of them on the 1000 block of N. Castle, two on the 1500 block of N. Dallas, three on the 1700 block of Ellsworth," says Michael Seipp, executive director of the nonprofit group. "These are some of the worst streets that I have ever stood on. They're hellholes.

"In the total package, conservatively, you're looking at two or three million dollars in rehab costs -- which, coincidentally, is about the same amount it would cost the taxpayers to tear them all down. You do the math. They're worth zero."

Says Henson: "It's a portfolio built on some of the worst neighborhoods in the city, and I don't think it's an accident. What you have here is someone who systematically exploited certain areas, and a certain population, for personal gain in a very deliberate way, over many years.

"I can only imagine the price that's been paid by the residents of these houses."

A mother's prayers

Shantell Robinson and little Christopher are still paying.

Three months after the Christmas holidays in 1997, Robinson moved out of 1120 N. Milton and signed the lease on a "lead-safe" house owned by a nonprofit group that specializes in handling such cases.

Fearing retaliation from her former landlord, she agreed to be interviewed only on the condition that her new address not be mentioned.

"Christopher got mine own house now," the 5-year-old says. "Those Christopher's toys. Good house, Mama, right? OK!"

"He still has speech problems," Robinson says. "And they say it will be a while before it all straightens out. But the doctor says his lead is way down, like a level 12."

She pauses, then sighs, struggling to hold a smile.

"We pray together every day."

Also in her prayers, she says, is anybody who might be living now at 1120 N. Milton.

She is praying for Michelle Thomas.

A 35-year-old single mother, Thomas is paying $289 a month to Dangerfield's Estate Management to shelter her 10 children -- ages 18 to 4 -- and her three grandchildren, all of them in diapers.

An inspection by the Housing Department on Sept. 22 revealed 16 violations of the city construction code, including defective doors, walls, windows, electrical fixtures and plumbing. The repair order was issued to Stein's Pick'n Chick'n. But it is Dangerfield's family that has been struggling to complete the work.

"The damn house has been milked out," fumes Donald Dangerfield, 43, as he surveys the broken front door and splintered windows on his younger brother's dubious investment. "Stein absolutely milked out every nickel he could, all the time feeding George some line about making him a millionaire."

Meanwhile, two years after Robinson first reported the hazardous lead conditions at 1120 N. Milton to the city Health Department, paint chips and dust are still visible on floors, sills and stairs.

Peeling paint and broken plaster dangle from the ceiling in an upstairs bedroom, above a sagging mattress where three children sleep. In the kitchen, paint flakes like dandruff from a window frame charred in a long-ago fire.

An independent inspection Dec. 8, paid for by The Sun, found lead levels in the house "many multiples" above those allowed by state law, said Shannon Cavaliere of Arc Environmental Inc., adding that it "would fail at least nine out of 10 points" in a Department of the Environment visual inspection.

The estimated cost of repairs exceeded $5,000 -- roughly the value of the entire house.

"Greater than 50 percent of the surfaces sampled exceed the state standard," Cavaliere wrote in a final report to the newspaper. "And nearly 30 percent of the readings were 20 times the standard. Failed 5 of the 15 dust wipes that were collected."

"Don't tell me that's lead paint," Thomas gasps. "God, no, not lead! I got babies living here!"  ¶ 6:08 PM