2006-05-08 - 4:48 p.m.
I have to admit that I�ve really been burning up inside for a while now about some of what Nya�s mother said about our recent engagement and even her reactions to me on her recent visit here, but I really can�t yet think that through clearly enough to write about it here. Soon, I�ll try to sort through it here. But for now, I�ll stick to recounting events that happened years ago. This here is something that happened in like 2000, while I was working for a real estate developer at a high-rise apartment complex we�d built.
The buildings were luxury apartments with high rents. A certain proportion of our tenants (maybe 20%) were young foreign people from very wealthy families. A lot of them were from oil-rich countries like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia (we had dozens of members of the Saudi royal family � over the generations the number of Saudi �princes� has grown to the tens of thousands). Antonios, the guy in this story, was the scion of a Greek shipping magnate (no, he was not an Onassis, but you get the idea).
These kids (and �kids� is how we referred to them around the management office, even though they were mostly at least college-age and some were even older than us) had been sent to America by their families to go to school. The Boston area has almost 100 colleges and we had tenants attending every obscure one you�ve never heard of. The smarter ones went to legitimate places like B.U. or even MIT. But the rich and stupid seemed to enroll at any place that would overlook the quality of their application for a fat donation from the parents.
An important element to this sojourn in America (one that most of the kids hadn�t seemed to have figured out) is that it served as a sort of litmus test to determine their future. Based on how they acted here, judgments were made about their future role in their family�s enterprise and their future slice of the pie in the family fortune. They were all from filthy rich families who wouldn�t blink at providing for them. But someone had to keep the oil flowing or the family business running.
Our office would sometimes get calls from people who whose fulltime career was just to keep these kids out of too much trouble. They would help them pay bills when they had no Social Security number and had never had a checkbook before (I guess back home, the servants would handle these things). When tooling around in their fancy cars resulted in a speeding ticket, these babysitters would make sure it got paid. Their actions were reported back to the homeland, either by these minders or through the general grapevine of friends and relatives.
Some kids behaved themselves (relatively speaking; part of the reason they were sent abroad was so they could sow their wild oats far out of sight of their parents� friends). They went to their classes, spent within whatever extravagant allowance they were given, had minimal run-ins with the law, and generally acted like they were en route to being remotely civilized people. So proved as vaguely responsible, they might receive an actual job helping keep the family money flowing in.
Some kids showed themselves to be complete disasters living on their own. They�d blow off school or crash several cars or knock someone up (or get knocked up) or all this and more. Having demonstrated themselves as quintessential useless rich brats, they wouldn�t like be shut out of the royal inheritance. They�d be still be financially taken care of (perhaps quite well, depending on the size of the family fortune). But there was no way they�d be given any role of responsibility with a commensurate share of the loot.
Antonios was this sort of walking pathetic hopelessness. Since foreign tenants didn�t have Social Security numbers and it was almost impossible to sue them if they didn�t pay their rent, we had them set up a �rental account�. This was a very legally dicey requirement (we always carefully referred to it as a �request�) that they deposit an entire year�s worth of rent into a bank account and make monthly direct deposits for their rent payments.
We also asked that they be vouched for either by an American citizen or a foreigner if they were a resident of our building, just someone to say they were trustworthy. Antonios first moved in the previous year and was backed by a tenant who was a business associate of his father. He (or more likely his family) also set up a rental account with an entire year�s rental payments.
After a year had elapsed and it was time to renew his lease, his backer had moved out of the building. However as Antonios was now a known tenant, he was allowed to renew anyway. More ominously in retrospect, a new rental account was never set up for some reason. This somehow got overlooked and no one ever really minded as long as the rent checks kept coming in every month.
One month, however, he simply stopped paying. At first, this didn�t raise any eyebrows. Tenants were late with rent all the time. They often seemed to just forget, since they hadn�t received some sort of invoice as a reminder. As they were generally incredibly wealthy however (and the actual amount they hadn�t paid seemed oddly immaterial � $3,000 overdue rent was the same as a $3 overdue library fine was the same as a $30,000 overdue car purchase), merely sending them a letter saying please pay usually sufficed.
Dozens of such letters went out every month. But Antonios must have chucked his in the circular file, because the full month went by and he still hadn�t paid. Now he owed the previous month�s rent and the current month�s rent. Needless to say, this attracted some notice. It was decided that at this point we should send a threatening letter and make vague allusions to eviction if he didn�t pay up.
Not that we really had much recourse to recover the money he owed. He had no Social Security number or even any status as a legal entity in America, so it wasn�t like we could sue. And not like we even knew how to actually evict someone. We�d never done it before and had only a vague notion that Cambridge was a particularly renter-friendly jurisdiction where successfully effecting an eviction would require jumping through all sorts of hoops.
My boss told me to see what was going on with the guy. If he had slipped through the cracks with setting up a new rental account, there wasn�t anything we could do now; what�s done is done. But why had he stopped paying rent? Maybe he was overwhelmed by having to deal with financial obligation. Maybe I could negotiate with him and work out an arrangement he found manageable. First I had to find out what his deal was.
He wouldn�t return my calls, so I first talked to the building security people to get what details they had on this cipher. It seemed he�d been acting up over the last few months. He often came home late at night totally zonked out, but many other tenants also did this. There was more though. An incident report from a few weeks ago said he�d been involved in a rather serious altercation with some non-residents who�d followed him home.
Reading the report over the fight at first seemed like a pretty typical showdown between hotheaded young men. The outside group (all Turks) had run into Antonios and his friends (all Greeks) at some club and started exchanging insults. Whatever. But the outsiders followed Antonios home to our building and the words had become blows in the lobby.
Antonios physically threw someone through a table there and security had to call the police in to help break it up. Man, I thought. I miss all the good stuff at night. At least our tenant seems to have won the fight. The guard said that had been pretty out of character. Like most of our other rich young tenants, Antonios was usually all talk and no action. I asked him if there was anything else I should know about Antonios.
Well, he went on to tell me, recently creepy-looking guys had been coming in and asking angrily for Antonios. When the front desk called up to his apartment, he�d tell them to say he wasn�t in. Hmm, curiouser and curiouser. What did these creepy guys look like? The guard considered it for a second before rolling his eyes disgusted. �Like rich Euros dressing down to play tough. Like wannabe gangsters.�
Indeed. I next checked with the valets to see what they knew. The building had a tight garage that required any car that needed parking to be squeezed into a space surrounded by other cars, necessitating valets to shuffle around everything. Tenants would call down for their cars to be brought up from the garage. As they often hung around the front and chatted with valets on duty to park incoming cars, the valets sometimes had inside knowledge of tenants� lives.
However, the valets said Antonios hadn�t been around for a while. He no longer paid for a parking space. He didn�t seem to have a car anymore; they thought he had sold his (some BMW sports car, as I recall) a month or so ago. Well that�s pretty weird, I thought. Even though there are two different subway stops a short walk away, the �kids� were like lost without their fancy cars to tear around in.
Antonios still wasn�t calling me back. I sent maintenance guy Joey (a 40-ish Boston Italian whose tough townie accent I still try to emulate sometimes) up to his apartment, calling ahead to say he had to come in to take care of some (fake) plumbing emergency. I asked him to just take a look around (I assumed Antonios wouldn�t be in) without opening anything or prying into hidden corners and tell me if anything unusual caught his eye.
When Joey came back, I asked if he had noticed anything unusual. �Did you find anything? I hope you didn�t disturb too much.�
�Yeah, no need there. I think what you got there is a kid playing hustler.�
�What do you mean?�
�I mean he had a whole pile of what-do-you-call-it right out there on the coffee table. The wacky weed. The marijuana.�
I whistled low. �Shit. Are you sure?�
�Well, not of course like I would ever touch the stuff myself. But I think I know from your high-quality grass. And he had a scale and plastic bags next to it.�
�What?!? For real?�
�Yeah, he�s real enterprising, that one. A real enterpriser. An enty! I should have just taken some and left cash on the table.�
What the hell was going on? All that money and he was selling pot! No wonder Euro-trash-playing-thugs were angry at him. He had probably burned them or something and now they wanted their petty revenge. I began to piece more of Antonios� story together. I talked to almost every member of the building staff and got everything each one knew about his activities.
(That�s enough for now; I�ll finish later�)
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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