St. Louis landlords charged by feds with fraud face growing number of lawsuits, liens
ST. LOUIS — When she moved into the Saum building at 1919 South Grand six months ago, Salinas Rangel immediately noticed the smell.
For weeks, it lingered.
Finally, Evette Townsend, the property manager for landlord STL CityWide, told Rangel and other seventh-floor residents that employees would be checking the apartments there to try and find the source. When Rangel returned from work that early June evening, the police were there. They had found a decomposing body in one of the units.
After that, Rangel complained about roaches throughout the building. She trudged up seven flights of stairs during the frequent elevator outages.
But she kept paying nearly $1,200 in monthly rent.
The final straw came last Saturday, when Rangel found a rat stuck in a trap. It was under a radiator, slowly roasting. She left that night.
"These people are insane if they think they're going to get another dollar out of me," Rangel said.
Rangel is considering her legal options now, and a lawsuit from her would be the latest in a growing number of legal actions piling up against one of the largest landlords in St. Louis and its owners, brothers Vic Alston and Sid Chakraverty.
Another recent lawsuit accuses a CityWide employee of stealing rent and illegally shutting off utilities at a downtown loft building, while one alleges a roach infestation at a Central West End property. Another three tenants have recently settled lawsuits against Alston, Chakraverty and their companies.
Meanwhile, Alston and Chakraverty's construction arm, Big Sur Construction, is facing over $3.3 million in construction liens filed this year against recent apartment developments in University City and Kansas City.
The liens and lawsuits are on top of federal criminal fraud charges unsealed in September, and they put further financial pressure on an enterprise that owns and manages an estimated 2,000 apartments in the St. Louis area. The criminal charges against Alston, Chakraverty and their chief financial officer, Shijing "Poppy" Cao , accuse the trio of defrauding St. Louis' minority hiring requirements for developers who receive construction incentives. All three have pleaded not guilty.
The tenants filing recent lawsuits are being represented by Al Johnson, a former St. Louis County prosecutor and private practice attorney who now heads nonprofit legal clinic New Covenant Legal Services. His clients' claims echo complaints that tenants of the brothers' properties have been voicing for years .
"Under the direction of Alston and Chakraverty, CityWide has devised a strategy of purchasing apartment buildings in the city of St. Louis and engaging in a pattern of deferred maintenance," Johnson wrote in one of the recent lawsuits. "They use fraud, deception, and bait-and-switch tactics to attract tenants and then engage in aggressive legal tactics when tenants balk at paying the exorbitant rents in buildings that are frequently deficient."
Stolen rent, illegal utility shutoff
Megan O'Donnell and Ryuichi Yamamoto sued in October over their experience in the ArtLofts at 1531 Washington Avenue. In addition to the brothers, the couple named Townsend, the CityWide property manager, and Jose Garcia, another manager, as defendants.
In their lawsuit, the couple accuse Garcia of stealing their $1,160 August rent check and then illegally shutting off their electricity.
A few days after depositing a check in a drop box, someone from CityWide informed O'Donnell and Yamamoto their rent was late. O'Donnell went to her bank and discovered that Garcia had cashed the check in his name. She told Garcia's supervisor, Townsend, who tried to "fabricate a story that would somehow exonerate" Garcia, according to the lawsuit.
Cao, the CityWide accountant who was indicted for fraud along with Chakraverty and Alston, was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. She is accused of contacting O'Donnell and Yamamoto at Alston and Chakraverty's direction to try and "cover up systematic, illegal goings-on at CityWide."
Garcia later promised to credit the check to the couple's August rent, but he never did, according to the suit. On top of that, both Townsend and Cao told them they still had to pay another $1,160 for that month's rent.
According to the lawsuit, O'Donnell and Yamamoto had already negotiated with Garcia a one-month extension to their lease through September. But on Aug. 23, four days before their original lease expired, Townsend told them CityWide would not honor the extension. They had to be out in less than a week.
The couple couldn't find a new place that quickly, so they remained in the unit into September.
In retaliation, Garcia shut off their electricity, even though O'Donnell and Yamamoto pay Ameren directly for electricity, their lawsuit says.
"This refusal to provide electricity is neither legal nor isolated," their suit says. "Rather, Defendants systematically shut off access to electricity for apartments they claim to behind in past-due rent or otherwise in alleged violation of the lease agreement to extort rent and enforce compliance."
The couple then ran extension cords under their door to power appliances, but CityWide employees cut them. One night, Garcia entered their apartment uninvited to "verbally harass plaintiffs and direct them to vacate the apartment early," the lawsuit says.
Meanwhile, CityWide employees "were providing slanderous and/or libelous tenant references" about O'Donnell and Yamamoto, including that they had not paid their August rent, their lawsuit says. That made it difficult to find a new landlord willing to take them.
Garcia, reached by phone, hung up when a reporter asked him about the utility shutoffs. Townsend did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition, two lawsuits accuse Alston and Chakraverty through their companies of renting out apartments without a state real estate license.
The Missouri Real Estate Commission in September 2023 sued CityWide for renting properties without a real estate broker's license and asked the courts for an injunction to stop CityWide from continuing to rent out the apartments.
But the state has not taken any action in the litigation since filing the lawsuit, and it's unclear whether it is even still pursuing the matter. Missouri Real Estate Commission Executive Director Brittany Tomblinson and the division's enforcement manager, Lisa Brush, did not respond to a request for comment.
Another recent lawsuit filed by Catheryn Bolick alleges a rodent infestation in CityWide's Hampden Hall on McPherson Avenue, where she paid nearly $1,400 a month for rent. She also said the elevators were routinely broken.
Three other tenants recently settled lawsuits against the brothers' companies. A lawsuit filed by Amdiel Clement last year claimed there was a roach infestation in CityWide's Maryland Lofts at 4340 Maryland Ave. The case settled in July.
In another case, one of CityWide's companies, Central PM LLC, sued Martez Mayo for past due rent in the ArtLofts. Mayo agreed to a deal in court that gave him until September to pay CityWide $6,000 in past due rent and fees. But on Aug. 15, the landlords cut off his electricity, according to a countersuit Mayo filed.
Ameren told Mayo they had not deactivated his electricity. When Mayo confronted Garcia about the shutoff, Garcia told him the landlord would only send a technician after he had paid his past-due rent, even though the settlement in his rent case gave Mayo until September. Central PM settled the case last week.
And another lawsuit from Demarkus Turner claimed CityWide employee Kyle Rhine told him he had to purchase a renter's insurance policy from Century-National Insurance Company when he moved into the Tanjiers apartments at 5522 Delmar Boulevard.
After a storm caused water damage in his apartment, Turner filed a claim but was denied. The lawsuit alleges that Rhine was actually an agent for Century in addition to CityWide.
"Unknown to plaintiff, there was a pre-existing agreement between the CityWide defendants Tanjiers, CityWide, and defendant Century to force and/or steer clients to Century," Turner's lawsuit says. "In turn, Century would sell an insurance policy to unsuspecting tenants in the Tanjiers apartments that provided coverage only to the CityWide defendants but little or no coverage to tenants, like plaintiff Turner."
Rhine hung up when reached by a reporter. The lawsuit settled in September.
Joe Jacobson , an attorney for Alston and Chakraverty's companies and employees in the tenant lawsuits, did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Johnson, the New Covenant attorney, said the number of large landlords "engaging in various patterns of tenant abuse" has increased over the last five years.
"We can file lawsuits all day, but the situation will only improve when we see some more aggressive enforcement by local and state officials of tenants' rights," he wrote.
Plead the Fifth
Meanwhile, mechanics liens have been piling up against Alston and Chakraverty's construction arm, Big Sur. At least $1.4 million in liens have been filed against the McKenzie a 251-unit apartment building recently constructed at Delmar Boulevard and Interstate 170 in University City. Another $1.9 million have been filed in Jackson County against Lux Living's recent projects in Kansas City.
Ira Berkowitz, Alston and Chakraverty's longtime attorney, did not respond to questions about whether Big Sur still had the capacity to pay its contractors.
And in a long-running legal dispute with loft owners at the Ely Walker loft building downtown, where Alston, Chakraverty and Cao control the condo board, a St. Louis judge last week ordered Chakraverty to sit for a deposition. Chakraverty had asked for a protective order to limit plaintiffs' attorneys from asking about anything that could impact the federal criminal charges against him.
Judge Joseph Whyte ruled that if Chakraverty was worried about implicating himself in the criminal case, he could invoke the Fifth Amendment.
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