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.
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.
Continue reading Whodunit Chapter 13: Who's Killing My Neighborhood.
Ron Kaye