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- [00:00]
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- [01:21]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. Hi, I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the Moth Podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Jack Hitt was recorded live at the Moth main stage.
- [01:48]
Jack Hitt
This is the story of my first landlord and my first apartment in New York. I think I'm going to call it Rent. I first came up here from South Carolina, like apparently, or North Carolina, like everybody on the stage tonight back in the early 80s and I was living on people's floors and I was trying to find an apartment. And I don't know if y'all remember what it was like to get an apartment in 1981. Some of you may not, but it required that you sort of commit a crime. There was all sorts of sort of subleases and various shady documents that had to be mimeographed in like Cuba and then sent back. And there was this thing called key money. Does anybody remember that? Key money? Maybe that's still around, I don't know. Anyway, a friend of mine called me up and said, I think I've got a place for you. It's in my building. You have to go talk to the superintendent. His name is Bob. And I said, okay, well what do I need to bring? And he said, you know, basically $550 in an envelope. So I showed up and went into the super's office, and there was Bob. And we started talking. And I said, well, here's the key money. And I just popped it on the desk. And I guess I didn't know the protocol of sleazing an apartment in New York. I guess you weren't supposed to put the key money right there in front of the superintendent. I seem to have offended him. By the way, my friend Kevin, when he warned me about going in there, he said, you know, Bob talks a little differently than other people, so just stay on your toes. So I put the key money on the table. Bob kind of fixed an eye on me. Says, let me tell you something, mister. One of those reporters came in here one time asking me if I would rent an apartment, you know, like this. And I could tell he had a device in his lapel. And I leaned right over in his lapel, and I said, let me tell you something, buster. I rent my apartments to anybody I want to. And I said it so loud that the guy in the sound truck out front came busting out the back of the car, blood gushing out of his ears, and ran off down the street. So I kind of looked at Bob and said, wow, that must have been quite a scream you made there. He kind of looked at me, and then I think I got a lease. I'm not sure. I lived there for 10 years. I think I had a lease. And Bob and I. Bob was the superintendent for four buildings on West 99th Street. And over the years, I got to learn just how this guy talked. It was not. It was just the way he described reality. It was all very different than maybe the one we all share here on this time space continuum. So, for example, one time he was fixing something in the hall, and he just offhandedly told me that he owned five ranches in Brazil where he was from, and two vineyards in Italy. I said, wow, Bob. I mean, so why are you fixing my toilet then? I don't, you know. And Bob said, well, you know, the stress of the ranches hurt my heart. And my doctor in Brazil said, grow more flesh to protect the heart. And Bob, in fact, had grown quite an ample carapace of flesh to protect his heart. He would tell you, like, you know, in my country, I can kill somebody and get away with it, because it's written into the constitution that you can't prosecute me. Okay, well, that. That must be very handy some somehow. And then there was my landlord. Now there was the landlord. His name was Alan Stern, he only showed up about once a week and he was fairly reasonable. You know, like there was a co op attempt. This was a big thing in the 80s. Everybody thought we were going to get rich. Both the landlords and the tenants all thought we were going to get super rich. And I cooperated with Alan and we tried to work this thing out. He was going to co op the building, he'd make a pile of money. We'd buy our apartments for cheap and then cash out and make tons of money and everybody would be happy. Well, it turns out the city sent an engineer up there and the report on our building said something like a column of dust held up by 125 years of paint. That's literally a quote from the engineer's report. And I sort of knew that because whenever I went to hammer a nail into the wall to hang a picture, you know, that feeling of like, you know, I was like, maybe I won't hang that picture. Maybe I'll tape up a poster over that large hole that I've just now made to the wall there. Yeah, so. But Ellen and I also had our differences. You know, like the apartment was split between sort of the yuppie scum like myself who had moved in with new jobs and a little bit of money, and there were these older Puerto Rican grandmothers who lived in the building who had much lower rents from way back when. And Alan wanted to make more money. So he was not doing anything for the old ladies and he was giving us all the services, which was Bob, of course. Bob would come in and fix your toilet and make it worse. But of course, what Alan didn't understand is that I'm a Southern guy. And one thing, you know, a Southern guy with an 8 year perfect attendance pin from Sunday school does really, really well is old lady management. So of course I knew or got to know every one of these old ladies and became their friend. And at one point, one of them showed me her apartment and I was like, what is your tub doing standing with all this water? Why are your johns not fixed? So I started a rent strike on behalf of these ladies. And Alan and I had very harsh words, but it was all very gentlemanly. He said he was going to take me to court and sue me because I had nothing to sue him for. And I said, alan, you know, we're all going to go to court. There's going to be all these nice grannies and they're going to be complaining. And then you're going to be saying that you do all the services for all of us. We look very different from the grannies. And this is gonna be in front of a judge. And so you're gonna lose. And so Alan. It took a while. Alan wasn't a rocket scientist. But Alan figured out that he was in fact gonna lose. And everything resolved amicably, you know. Meanwhile, there was Bob. Bob. One time, I remember we had these funny lamps in the kitchen. Those round, like, fluorescent things, you know. They worked for like five years, and then finally mine went out. They were also in the hall of this building. And I went to Bob and I said, bob, you know those funny round lamps in the hall. Mine's burnt out. I'm just, you know, do I buy those or. I mean, do you have them? I mean, where do I. I don't even know where to get one of those, you know. And he goes, let me tell you something, mister. Don't. Don't try to steal the lamps in the hall. I have put a device in there. If you take the bulb out, it will explode the glass, shoot it in your eyes, and you will be blind. So I took this to mean that I was to buy the lamp because I had finally mastered Bob Ness, you know. So I lived in this apartment for 10 years into the early 90s. And one day I was walking to work and I hadn't seen Bob or Alan for a couple of days. There was another superintendent, the only one that was worth ever talking to Smitty, and the only one who could fix anything. But nobody seemed to be around. There were four buildings. They were all owned by the same little group there. And I was walking to work and I saw that the Daily News had another headline. It said, Terror Landlord in New York. I thought, oh, that sounds good. I walked over and I looked at it and was like, that's my landlord. It's Alan Stern. Terror Landlord. That's my guy. And I picked up the paper, I sat down and read the story. It was unbelievable. Alan had gotten so Alan and his sister. By the way, this story is true. Alan and his sister owned the four buildings. And so each of them basically had two. The sister's husband was divorcing her, and under the New York rules, he would get half the family assets, which would be one of these four buildings which were worth. Even though there were six stories of. Of columns of dust held up by 125 years of paint, as you know, that's still worth a lot of money in New York City. So Alan did not want to part with one of his six stories of dust held up by 125 years of paint. That easily. So he had the guy killed. And Bob apparently had found the hitman and contract and they had killed this guy like a long time ago, like when I was living in the building, you know what I mean? Like 1984 or something. They killed. They had this guy shot. You know, one of those stories like the guy's found dead under a bridge. It was down in the village. He was found on the west side highway, and they thought he'd just been mugged, you know, the wallet had been taken or something like that. And so lo and behold, all of a sudden, you know, Alan was gone. He got life. He went to prison forever. And Bob had ratted him out. And Bob still lived in our building. I would see him. It's like unbelievable, you know. And then after a couple of years, Bob just sort of disappeared and the story just went away. We all just were just stunned and so. And eventually I got married and moved out of the city, and I now live in New Haven, Connecticut, and I work for the New York Times. And I was working on a story one time about money laundering on a little island called Nauru. It's in the Pacific Ocean. And I'd called this assistant Secretary of the treasury who was in charge of investigating complicated financial things. His name is John Moscow. Is that a great name or what? And he actually is exactly the name that you think. He picked up the phone, John Moscow. I was like, I'm Jack Hitt, blah blah blah, New York Times, calling me up, money laundering. So, you know, in that first moment of calling somebody for an interview, you know, you sort of chat them up a little bit, you know, so we were just talking and everything. I said, have you been doing lots of financial crime? You know, no, no, I used to do homicide in New York. Homicide. I was like, oh, well, I said, yeah, back in the glory days, you know, before Dinkins and Giuliani stopped crime, before that happened, there was actually like this crime wave under the rule of Ed Koch, you know, 2,000 people a year or something. And I said, oh, yeah, the glory days of New York. I remember. Yeah. You know, I was actually sort of involved in one of those. I had a landlord who had his brother in law killed and, you know, and he got put away. He goes, Alan Stern, 206 W. 99th St. I'm like, yeah. He goes, I'm the one who put him away. I couldn't believe it. What are the odds? You know, I call all the DAs in the world to get this guy. So we start chatting. It's like unbelievable. And he says, you know, yeah, you know, Bob had turned state's witness. He'd called that number 555 tips. You know, that crime number. That's how he turned Alan in. So. So I said, man, you know Bob, what a nut that guy was. I said, you know, he was just the most incompetent guy ever. You know, he was just. Every time he'd, you know, every time he'd fix anything. One time he went to fix one of my sinks and put so much of that Drano like fluid in there, I literally blew the whole sink off the wall. And I had to move out of the apartment for a week to get the sludge out. And I said, you know, he used to always, how did you deal with him? You know, he would always come up with these crazy stories, you know, he'd tell us, like, you know, well, you know, I'm in the constitution, I can't be charged with murder in Brazil. Moscow says, yeah, that one's kind of true. I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, there's some truth there. I said, what are you talking about? He goes, well, you have to understand, Bob DeSalvo was a member of the Brazilian secret police. And he killed people, a lot of people. And he, we think cut some deal with the government and moved to New York and became your super. No way. Way. And I went and looked it up. I went and looked up the trial, you know, and at one point in the trial, he's asked about what he did in Brazil. And he said, I tortured people. My specialty was men. I'm like, oh my God, you know. So then Moscow finally explains the whole story, which is essentially that Alan, having killed his brother in law, wanted to rub out a couple of troublemakers in the building. And he wanted Bob to go hire the same killers to kill these tenant activists because they were causing him all this trouble. And Bob realized, he says, you can't do that. You know, you're going to be the first suspect, you know, you can't do it. And he says, well, I'm going to do it. If you don't do it, I'm going to do it. And Bob, thinking like a good secret police torturer, realized that if he didn't rat Allen out, he was going to get caught because Alan was going to do this stupid thing, get caught, and then Bob was going to get implicated in the earlier killing. So Bob called 555 tips and turned him in. And so John Moscow is telling me this. I'm going, John. I'm the tenet activist. That's me. I'm one of them anyway. So Bob DeSalvo, my crazy superintendent, may actually have saved my life. Thank you.
- [16:27]
Dan Kennedy
Jack Hitt is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and the public radio program this American Life. He is the author of off the Road, A Modern Day Walk down the Pilgrim's Route into Spain and is currently at work on a book entitled Bunch of In Search of the American Character. Our podcast host Dan Kennedy is the author of the recently published book Rock An Office Power Ballad. Learn more@rockonthebook.com he is also the author of Loser Goes First. The Moth is a non profit organization. Consider supporting our free podcast by going to our podcast contribution page or by becoming a moth member@themoth.org where you can also buy moth stories on CD, including today's story which is featured on Audience Favorites Volume 4. And please tell us what you thought of today's episode. Tell us what you think of the Moth podcast in general. What do you love? What do you hate? What would you like to hear more of or less of? Email us@podcastthemoth.org thanks to all of you for listening. We hope you'll have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruwest at the Argo Network Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.