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Crime and Punishment:

The Repentance of Nadya Mahdavi and Nasir Shaikh

Judgment Day was finally here

It had taken 18 months to get to this moment.

A lot had happened since city inspectors first cited Nadya Mahdavi for construction without a permit at the house on Haynes Street in my modest Valley tract of single-family homes.

The case snowballed after neighbors figured out that Mahdavi was illegally converting the house into a three-unit tenement that threatened the quality of their lives and the value of their property.

They complained to the city, to Councilman Dennis Zine. They researched property records, they finally got mad enough to walk door-to-door with petitions demanding the city do something about it

That's how I got involved and started asking questions. I wanted to help, I wanted to know who was killing my neighborhood.

Was it just a greedy landlord trying to get more than $5,000 in rent by converting a 2,000-square-foot house into three units, each with its own kitchen and bathroom, 12 rooms in all? Or was it the system itself, the city, that was responsible for failing in its duty?

Everyone was a suspect.

The trail led to Chief Inspector Frank Bush and others in the Building and Safety Department, to Zine and his staff and finally to the Van Nuys Courthouse and Deputy City Attorney Don Cocek.

Citations started piling up even as Mahdavi flipped ownership of the house each time a court date approached. The ownership went from Mahdavi's Wall Street Properties to her employee to a company called Fidelity Investment Group which listed her husband Nasir Shaikh as president.

A simple permit problem, an infraction, escalated into a series of charges, misdemeanor crimes subject to fines and jail time, that were filed against Mahdavi, Shaikh and Fidelity Investments.

It took officials a while to unravel the chain of ownership and identify exactly who to hold accountable and for what.

The accused played the system for time, provided misleading information, asked for Public Defenders, didn't have lawyers representing them.

Mahdavi's failure to appear in court led to a warrant for her arrest being issued -- something that took two months to achieve because of the multiple addresses where she might be living.

Authorities' attitudes hardened as the months dragged on. My neighbors adjusted to the irritation of many cars parked at the home on Haynes and the comings and goings of the tenants of the three units.

Finally, 13 months after the first citation, the deconstruction of the house got under way and it was brought back into compliance with the law. It took six more months for Judgment Day to arrive.

Mahdavi and Shaikh were already at court when I arrived yesterday. They didn't look as cocky as they had before. They greeted me with smiles.

A lot had happened in their lives since they bought the house on Haynes. Their marriage had broken up, their high-flying lives had come down to earth as the collapse of the housing market cost them dearly, unraveling their various property schemes.

Encino attorney Gerald Cobb had worked out a deal with Cocek: Fidelity would plead guilty to three counts, Mahdavi and Shaikh would plead no contest to two counts each. They would be fined just under $10,000 and pay $1,500 in investigative fees. They would be on probation for a year and if they stay out of trouble and pay the fine, the charges will be reduced on their record from misdemeanors to infractions.

It was just before noon when they were called to appear before Commissioner Thomas E. Grodin who had imposed his own condition on the plea bargain: Each of the defendants was required to write a 1,000-word essay of contrition for him to consider at sentencing.

Mahdavi's essay ended this way:

"I would just like to state that I am extremely grateful for being given an opportunity to resolve this case. I sincerely appreciate and am appalled by the kindness and generosity displayed by the People and the City in respect to not placing a damaging note on my record. The People have been very patient and generous with me and I do not deserve such mercy. I assure you that this will never happen again."

I'm sure she didn't mean to use the word "appalled" but she was late getting her essay to Grodin who was not amused and found both their essays "self-serving...barely made it." Grodin lectured them, awarding a grade of D to Mahdavi and C-minus to Shaikh.

"I was not terribly impressed ...frankly, with either one."

As we left the courthouse, Cocek said all the information he had gathered was turned over to the state Department of Real Estate.

"If they screw-up again, they will lose their licenses," he said.

The case was closed.

My neighborhood is as safe and tranquil as ever. The suspects were identified and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The system worked, if slowly. The inspectors, Cocek, the court system had done their jobs well and honorably.

But I couldn't help wondering how much my own role might have changed the course of events, the exposure of the case for all the world to see causing officials to spend far more time on it than was usual.

In her letter to Grodin, Mahdavi acknowledges how that affected her: "The humiliation and disgrace I have felt from being portrayed as a criminal and the harassment I have received through internet exposure has caused such a terrible impact on me and my family"

In the grand scheme of things, this was a small matter.

There are thousands of more serious violations of housing codes going undetected all over the city, especially in poorer areas.

Building and Safety is grossly understaffed and taking a bigger hit in the city budget crisis with our elected officials gutting funds for code enforcement to protect jobs that facilitate developers moving ahead on new projects that generate revenue.

So who is killing our neighborhoods?

There's a lot people like Mahdavi and Shaikh who do stupid and greedy things. Only the few are caught and punished despite the efforts of people like Frank Bush, Don Cocek and Judge Grodin to protect us. Usually, it takes the neighborhoods themselves to bring these problems to their attention and persist until they get action.

The same cannot be said for the city's leadership.

Throughout the current budget process, they have only talked about how to bring in more revenue to the city -- not how to preserve the neighborhoods or the quality of life for the residents.

Laws for our protection are haphazardly enforced and resources are expended to get developments approved faster and faster even though the infrastructure is deteriorating and inadequate for our needs.

Whodunit? It's really not a mystery.

Read the full text of Mahdavi's essay:

Justice delayed due to faulty machinery, mechanical -- bureaucratic

Chelsea Cody
OurLA.org Writer

"There will be no more continuances. This is the last one." said Commissioner Thomas Grodin before dismissing Nasir Shaikh, his new attorney Monica Romallo and ex-wife Nadya Mahdavi's counsel Gerald Cobb from the courtroom to discuss a settlement plan with Deputy City Attorney Donald Cocek. 

After a long day of delayed hearings due to malfunctioning public elevators at the Van Nuys courthouse, Commissioner Grodin was short on patience.

The court waited for over an hour and a half for Shaikh to appear and Mahdavi was not present as her attorney advised her that her appearance would not be necessary.

Grudgingly granting a continuance, Grodin said all parties involved had better come to some kind of settlement or be prepared to go to trial come July 14.

More than a year of delays and difficulties has prolonged the case of the People of Los Angeles vs. Shaikh and Mahdavi. Pleas of poverty, denials of ownership and failure to appear before the court (with or without an attorney) have postponed any final decision. Yesterday it was malfunctioning machinery.

Resolving the illegal conversion of a single-family home into a three-apartment tenement on 19953 Haynes St. in Woodland Hills has dragged on since the beginning of 2008 only to be delayed - one hopes - one last time.

That is, if the city can keep the elevators working.

A plea of poverty: "I'm saying is there is no money"

Finally, the Day of Reckoning for the people accused of killing my neighborhood -- April Fool's!

Thirteen months after Nadya Mahdavi was first cited for construction without a permit and began converting a house in my single-family tract into a three-unit tenement, she and her now ex-husband Nasir Shaikh were supposed to face the strong arm of the law and go to trial Wednesday.

But as has happened time after time, they found a way to postpone their date with LA's justice system.

Shaikh had stalled the case for months by denying he was a principal of Fidelity Investments Group which bought the house from his secretary Claudia Perez who bought the house from his wife -- all in the space of six months last year.

On Wednesday, his excuse was he's so poor that he can't afford a lawyer so he stood before Commissioner Thomas E. Grodin in Van Nuys Court Department 121 and asked for an attorney to be provided him at taxpayer expense.

His vow of poverty got him a stern lecture from Grodin but it did buy a delay until April 30, much as his wife's flipping ownership of the house, failure to appear in court and her own pleas of poverty had gotten them a long string of continuances.

There was no discussion of the $40,000 or so the couple has gotten in rent on the house that has caused my neighbors so much distress but there was considerable talk about the four houses owned by Fidelity Investments, some of which have Building and Safety issues now being investigated.

Assistant City Attorney tracked down the four properties and put their assessed value at about $3 million with one valued at just under $1 million.

Shaikh insisted the properties are all "under water" and he can't afford child support so he needs a lawyer. He was supposed to bring income tax and other financial records but offered the court only a few pay stubs.

"All the properties are upside down. . .what I'm saying is there is no money,'' Shaikh said.

Grodin was unimpressed: ""I told you last time you were supposed to come with an attorney. You told my bailiff you had an attorney."

When Shaikh disputed that, Grodin turned on him: "His word is good. What's going on is you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth . . . I can't appoint a lawyer for you at government expense."

At that point, Shaikh talked out of the side of his mouth that communicated his desire to represent himself. "I would like to go pro per."

In the meantime, the deconstruction of the tenement at 19953 Haynes St. in Woodland Hills is going on with kitchens going out and interior walls going in and one of the three tenants leaving. Soon, it is likely to look like a single family home again on the inside although the law does not proscribe how many people actually live in such a dwelling.

The investigation of the property dealings of Shaikh and Mahdavi are expanding to the various companies they set up and their employees but there is no indication whether anyone will take a hard look at how these transactions were put together and financed.

Mahdavi's attorney, Gerald Cobb, indicated to the court that the house on Haynes will soon be in compliance with the law.

As is usual in these cases, compliance is prosecutor Cocek's No. 1 goal.

But these are criminal charges, four misdemeanors carrying penalties of up to six months in jail and $1,000 fines each, and it remains to be seen how it will play out in the end.

Will my neighbors feel justice was served and the punishment fit the crime?

Will they see compliance with the law as the proper resolution to the year of aggravation, the year of worrying that their neighborhood, their property, would go down the road to becoming a slum like so much of LA

Will they accept that the economic meltdown that appears to have robbed Mahdavi and Shaikh of their dreams of wealth as a fitting end to the story?

The verdict and sentencing in this case -- a rare one that has become publicly visible -- will tell us a lot about whether it's people like Mahdavi and Shaikh who are killing our neighborhoods or whether it's the city itself, its policies, its laws, its enforcement that are the real criminals.

A "ridiculously reasonable" plea bargain proposal

Trying to solve the mystery of who's killing my neighborhood has consumed a lot of my time and energy for the past eight months but I'm realizing that a detective's lot is not the stuff that of Sherlock Holmes or even Sam Spade.

You ask dumb questions and get dumb answers and you think you got the suspect nailed so you sit in court for hours a time half listening to the sorry tales of petty crimes and petty punishments.

I don't know how cops or prosecutors or judges or even city Building and Safety inspectors do it. It's a job, I guess.

We're at the one year anniversary of when my neighbors noticed odd goings-on at the house on Haynes Street in what I call Lower Woodland Hills, a notch of modest tract homes north of Victory Boulevard that went up in the late 1950s. I've lived here for more than two decades, some neighbors since the tract was built.

So when work crews started turning the house on Haynes into three apartments, three kitchens, three bathrooms and a dozen or so rooms overall, it was a cause of concern -- a threat to their sense of place, to the value of their property, their security, the quality of their lives, a sign of the times of the deterioration of our neighborhoods.

Building and Safety issued the first citation for construction without a permit 11 months ago. More citations followed and finally misdemeanor criminal charges but the house's ownership kept getting flipped, the suspect list clouded, hearings continued.

And finally Wednesday, it looked like the case might actually go to trial. But it didn't.

Instead, attorney Gerald Cobb showed up with Nasir Shaikh, who along with his wife Nadya Mahdavi, are accused of four counts involving the illegal conversion of the house on Haynes into a tenement. It was only last month that Shaikh was charged when state records showed he was the CEO of Fidelity Investments Groups, which owns the house bought out of foreclosure in January 2008 by Mahdavi and "sold" to her employee in May and then to Fidelity two months later.

The kitchen in the garage apartment was removed last week along with the wall separating it from one of other apartments, Cobb told Assistant City Attorney Don Cocek. Mahdavi's father was a long-time client and a good man, he said, not "greedy and disrespectful," and wanted to restore the tenement to being a single-family home to legal status with rooms that opened up to each other. The tenant in the garage could stay legally, he noted, because there's a carport.

But there was a problem.

American Justice: Smokers, the con man and the quality of our lives

Once again Wednesday, I found myself sitting in Department 101 of the Van Nuys Municipal Court to observe the case of the People of Los Angeles vs. Nadya Mahdavi and Fidelity Investments LLC who are accused in a criminal complaint of illegally converting a single-family house in my tract into a three-apartment tenement.

She was standing in the hallway chatting on her cell phone and smiled sweetly at me as I headed into the courtroom. She was there to finally enter a plea to the four misdemeanor charges dating back nine months to when the Building and Safety Department first cited her  for construction without a permit.

As the citations grew in number and finally turned into criminal charges, Mahdavi had managed to avoid even getting to the point of entering a plea,  first by failing to appear, then appearing without a lawyer and then getting a continuance.

Assistant City Attorney Don Cocek assured me she wouldn't get another delay.

So I sat in court and listened to case after case of people facing everything from petty theft to drug charges to building code violations to spousal abuse.

Muncipal courts are fascinating, the place where ordinary people come against the law with little chance of escaping the consequences.

Nancy Johnson and Nzinga Owolo, like most of the defendants, found there was no alternative to pleading guilty to the crime they were accused of: Smoking in the park.

"Cigarettes?" I asked Johnson.

"Yes," she said, "my cousin and I went to Balboa Park to fish, for tilapia mostly, and we lit up cigarettes and we're just talking when the ranger came up and wrote us up."

Johnson and Owolo pleaded guilty and were fined $30 each. But the court costs raised their penalty to $250 each because smoking in the park is a misdemeanor crime, not just an infraction, so the fees are high and they now have criminal records which makes those fish they were catching pretty expensive.

"It's crap" Johnson said. "Ridiculous  There's no signs posted. We went around the park and took pictures but nobody cares. They just want your money."

Dumb cops and dumb reporters have a lot in common. They plod along gathering the facts, just the facts M'am, and they hope that sooner or later that they'll stumble across something or get a tip and it will become clear what's going on.

It was that kind of break that took me up the long winding road with its switchbacks to the top of Topanga Canyon high in the Santa Monicas looking for Javier Ovando and his mansion.

Unlike the hippie shacks and cabins and old compounds down below that give Topanga its character, the houses on top of the ridge are new and modern and large. Ovando's house at 21126 Bellini Drive sits on a hillside at the end of a cul-de-sac lined with luxury homes.

It was clearly deserted and looked like it had been for a while. Trash filled half a dozen garbage cans and several boxes behind the gate to the property.

Ovando is L.A.'s ultimate victim, the central figure in what became known as the Rampart Scandal.

On Oct. 12, 1996, LAPD Officers Rafael Perez and Nino Durden entered apartment of the then 19-year-old illegal immigrant gang member and shot him in the head, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Then, they framed him and got him sentenced to 23 years in prison. He was released three years later and on Nov. 21, 2000, his attorney Gregory Moreno won him a $15 million settlement -- the largest ever from the LAPD.

The money got him this 6,000 square-foot house but it didn't restore his ability to walk or let him find a happy life.

Once again, he was a victim, according to the tip I got that sent me to the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station on Agoura Road.

"Suspicious circumstances possible grand theft," according to the Sheriff's Department report dated Oct. 16, just 12 years and four days after Perez and Durden shot him.

The investigation involved the alleged theft of some $60,000 in property from the house -- four crystal chandeliers, a fireplace mantel, a pool table, a microwave, 35 door knobs, 20 curtains, three trash cans and a mailbox among other items.

Ovando's sister-in-law Angelica Martin reported what had happened to deputies but she wouldn't put them in touch with Ovando himself.

That didn't sit well with Deputies Diestel and Braden who took down her complaint and said she was "evasive," and told them that Ovando "had become mentally ill due to the burglary and could not be reached by anyone."

"Martin told me the suspect in the theft was Nadya Mahdavi AKA Hena Alvi Wall St. Financial Group," the deputies reported.

That's what had gotten my interest.

Mahdavi, president of Wall Street Financial with offices in Encino, Fidelity Investment Group, another company that lists her as an officer, are charged with four misdemeanor Building and Safety code violations involved the conversion of a single family home in my Valley floor tract into a tenement with three apartments and a dozen or so rooms in a 2,000 square-foot house.

The case has dragged on for months as the ownership flipped from Mahdavi to her employee at Wall Street to Fidelity. She had failed to appear the first time she was due in court and had to put up $5,000 cash bail when a warrant for her arrest was issued. She made it to the court the second but pleaded poverty and wanted a Public Defender, a request that was denied.

She appeared in court Thursday afternoon with attorney Gerald Cobb and was granted another continuance and is due back on Dec. 17 -- nearly 10 months after conversion of the house on Haynes Street in Woodland Hills began without a permit.
 
The sheriff's report makes no mention of Mahdavi being interviewed about what happened at the house on Bellini Drive and concludes: "I was unable to determine if a crime had occurred. I was unable to contact the owner of the location or verify if Javier Ovando had any connection to the property."

Deputies did determine that a restraining order was issued against the 31-year-old Ovando at the request of Mahdavi.

My next step was to call Martin who insisted she gave deputies all the information she had but Ovando was in no condition to talk. The trauma of what had happened was too much for him.

He had put the house up for sale in the spring, she said, and Mahdavi and her husband Nasir Shaikh had agreed to buy it for about $2 million through a local real estate agent. They put some earnest money into an escrow account but even before the sale went through, the couple and their family moved into the house.

The sale never was completed and they stayed there until early October when they left after an eviction order was issued. In the intervening months, she said, a dispute arose over demands for what she said was an exorbitant commission for the sale and that's when Ovando went to the house and the incident occurred that led to the restraining order.

"They accused him of making a terrorist threat," said attorney Moreno, who got involved about the time of the incident.

He's still talking to the District Attorney's Office about charges Ovando faces over his run-in with Mahdavi on June 22 and for leading police on an hour-long high-speed chase a week later in Glendale.

He also is sharing with investigators the information he has gathered about what happened atop the ridge above Topanga Canyon and the sale of the house the Rampart Scandal bought for Javier Ovando.

To be continued...

A Day in Court (continued): Meeting the Judge

Pleading indigence and ignorance, Nadya Mahdavi stood before the court Wednesday afternoon and declared: "I don't even know why I'm here."

Mahdavi (on the right in her Facebook picture at a Halloween party) stands accused as an individual and as officer of the firm that owns the single family home that became a tenement  of four misdemeanor criminal violations of LA.'s building code.

It was a remarkable Van Nuys Muncipal Court appearance for the leading suspect in this mystery that has dragged on since March, much to the frustration and anger of many of my neighbors who see the conversion of this 2,000 square foot house into a tenement with three apartments and 12 or so rooms as a threat to the quality of their lives.

Mahdavi, joined by her husband Nasir Shaikh, were kept cooling their heels from 9 a.m. in part because she failed to appear in court when summoned previously and in part for "attitude adjustment" because as Commissioner Rebecca Omens noted she was overheard calling Assistant City Attorney Don Cocek "a piece of shit."

Cocek, who spends all day trying to get people to comply with the law rather than go to jail, offended by Mahdavi by asking if she had a lawyer and cutting off the conversation on how to restore the house to its original state when she insisted she wanted a Public Defender.

Mahdavi's Facebook page says she attended Chatsworth and El Camino high schools and is the president of Wall Street Properties,  "an investment firm with real estate and mortgage division." She and her husband also own a Porsche and a Mercedes, Cocek noted.

And she is listed as an officer of Fidelity Investments Group LLC which bought the house at 19953 Haynes St. this summer from Claudia Perez, an employee of Wall Street Properties, who bought the house in May from Mahdavi who bought the house out of foreclosure in January.

She was cited for construction without a permit in March but flipped the house before the issue could be resolved and the units were rented in May and June -- asking price $5,500 for the three -- which led to more citations for an illegal structure and other violations and the purchase by Fidelity Investments.

For the neighbors, the case has dragged on interminably and there's no end in sight.

It took a long time before Building and Safety could track down several possible residences where she might live and the cops to leave a note that a warrant was issued for failure to appear in court in September and for her to show up at the Devonshire Division Police Station with a lawyer to be booked, fingerprinted and released on $5,000 cash bail.

The Public Defender didn't buy her plea of poverty so Mahdavi appeared before Commissioner Omens and pleaded that she had four kids and was getting separated from her husband. And besides, she had never been served with papers, perhaps because her office had moved from West Hills to Encino.

"I don't own this property anymore," she said. "I purchased it from the bank and sold it."

She knew nothing of her connection to Fidelity Investments, which shows up in Secretary of State filings with her husband as the agent of service.

Omens, who seemed ready to jail her at one point, suggested Mahdavi needed to get a lawyer and ordered her to come back next Thursday.

"Am I allowed to come without an attorney?" she asked. "I don't have a penny for an attorney. Can I know why I'm here? I don't know."

Cocek calmly explained the charges and her role as defined in the incorporation papers.

Her husband sat quietly in the audience throughout the hearing and whispered "sorry" to her when they left the courtroom..

To be continued...


 

A Day in Court: The Suspect

It seems fitting somehow that Nadya Mahdavi, the landlord at the heart of the mystery about who's killing my neighborhood, surrendered to police a month to the day after she failed to show up in court.

Mahdavii faces several charges that could carry six months in jail and $1,000 fines growing out of the illegal conversion of a modest single family house in my neighborhood into a tenement with three apartments and a dozen rooms.

Jessica Tarman, in Councilman Dennis Zine's office, alerted me that Mahdavi was arrested Thursday night. Zine, who took an intense interest in the case after we had a confrontation over how it was being handled months ago, had wanted me to join him in making the arrest but police brass nixed the idea.

Tarman didn't know much else so I called Chief Inspector Frank Bush of the Building and Safety Department who filled in a few sketchy details. An officer left a note at one of the houses where Mahdavi was believed to live and got a call from an attorney who met the suspect at the Devonshire Division station where she turned herself in.

She was booked and posted the $5,000 bail on her warrant and then released. Her company, Fidelity Investments LLC has a Nov. 5 date in Van Nuys Courthouse, Bush said

The Watch Commander at Devonshire Division, Sgt. Walters, wasn't on duty last night so he couldn't add much. And yes, they took a booking photo but no, you can't have it because it's against policy.

Very routine, happens everyday kind of crime, not the stuff of best-selling mysteries.

But it's not that way for my neighbors. This is a drama that started back in February and there's no end in sight despite the honest efforts of Building and Safety, City Attorney Don Cocek, the LAPD and Zine.

My neighbors see the house at 19952 Haynes St. as an eyesore, a cancer in their neighborhood, It undermines the quality of their lives and destroys the sense of place that they learned to love living in a quiet tract of single family homes abutting an L.A. River channel with streets designed to keep traffic to a minimum.

This is their home and in some cases has been their home for 50 years.

And there's a tenement with a bunch of people living in it and five or six cars in the driveway or parked in front and a dog named Kashi tied up in front much of the day and the night. The residents don't make a lot of noise and niether does Kashi but my dog Bruno -- a pit bull and shar-pei mix who carries 60 pounds of jaw and muscle and latent fury from the abuse he suffered before we found him in our bushes -- is so scared of Kashi from an early confrontation that he looks the other way when we walk nearby.

I understand why the system sees this problem as no big deal. This is a city where gangs run wild, drug dealing is rampant and the political system is corrupt.

So the concerns of a few people in one little tract don't amount to a hill of beans.

But that isn't how my neighbors feel. Or how people all over the city feel about the concerns they have. The concerns of the city's people don't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

That's really what's wrong with L.A., why there is so much discontent, so much middle class flight for so long, why L.A. is becoming a city of rich people who can take care of themselves and poor people who can't do anythiing about it.

I believe it's likely that justice of sorts will be done in this case. That the residents of the tenement who haven't violated any laws will be evicted and given help by the city to find another place to live.

But how long will it take and will it really solve the mystery of who's killing my neighborhood?

The wheels of justice turn slowly and awkwardly at best and that's little consolation to the victims of lawless behavior.

It all seemed so simple those many months ago when when my neighbors found out the foreclosed home nearby was being converted into a three-unit tenement -- three kitchens, four baths, more than a dozen rooms in all -- in 2,000 square feet.

Last month, the city charged the owners of the property at 19953 Haynes St. in Woodland Hills with four misdemeanor crimes -- illegal use of land, illegal occupancy, construction without a permit and failure to comply -- and gave them six weeks to appear in court.

Wednesday was their day in court. They didn't show up, Their lawyer didn't call. Warrants were issued for their arrest.

So tonight nothing has changed. There are still five or six cars in the driveway, the neighbors are still upset at seeing the modest stake in paradise being trashed by ineffective city policies and Kashi the dog  still is chained in front of the house and has my dog Bruno so scared he looks the other way when we walk by.

I learned in recent months that this kind of thing is going on all over the city and not enough is being done about it. Most of the time neighbors have to get together and make a big stink to get action.

While City Hall is saving us from second-hand smoke in the parks and taking money for the visual blight of 24-hour-a-day monster flashing electronic billboards, neighborhoods all over the city are being turned into slums.

I went to court in Van Nuys today to see how the system works when these defendants -- Nady Madhavi who bought the house in January and flipped it in May and something called Fidelity Investments LLC of Bellflower, the third owner in six months -- were due to enter their pleas.

I watched prostitues and druggies and abusers of animals and wives went before Magistrate Rebecca Omens one after another, most of them needing two or three months to pay fines and costs of $200 or so.

And I watched Deputy City Attorney Donald Cocek, with two Building and Safety officials standing by, deal with one case after another and patiently take time to talk to people accused of violating Building and Safety laws and regulations.

His goal was to get the problem fixed, to get people to comply with the rules, get permits and fix up their properties to code. There was a man who needed a Thai interpreter, one who needed a Korean interpreter, a third who needed a Spanish interpreter.

These were people who didn't understand the rules, who weren't turning single family homes into tenements, who weren't destroying the quality of life in their neighborhoods for profit. Cocek has a 100 percent compliance record in these cases.

My case was different and he was surprised no one showed up for it. But he's just the guy who handles the case in court, the guy who asks the judge to issue the arrest warrants. The Building and Safety guys just enforce the code.

Nobody, as far as this sleuth has been able to determine, actually investigates the relationships between the the three different owners this year of the house at 19953 Haynes Street. Nobody looks for the patterns, the larger abuses. And nobody can do anything about it as the clock keeps ticking and the rent keeps flowing in at the rate of about $5,000 a month.

The wheels of justice move slowly and the neighborhood's resentment over this nuisance keeps growing and City Hall keeps fiddling around while the city burns.