Tuesday, November 13, 2007

A Sledgehammer and Three Hookers

"There I am, sitting in a cab heading toward a bar in Brooklyn. My phone buzzes in my pocket and I see it is my roommate." This is how my week went from alright to shit in about three minutes.

My roommate proceeded to tell me the happenings of an undercover police raid that had just taken place at our apartment. We had been suspicious for a while since there was a lot of foot traffic up to their apartment and it always seemed to be guys walking in by themselves. We had a few situations where a "John" walked into my apartment looking for some action. Once he saw me and the extremely angry look on my face, he apologized and left. Another situation was that at about 4am we had some asshole "John" pounding on our door. A friend of ours was sleeping on the couch and awoke to let the desperate man know he was pounding on the wrong door. The last occurrence that I will mention was when I heard a bunch of noise coming from their upstairs door, which is next to our upstairs door, so I looked out the peep hole to check it out. There one of the hookers stood in a school girl skirt and a bra ushering in the next customer.

Back to the main story, my phone rang and I immediately picked it up. My roommate was all shaken up as he started telling me the story. He was sitting in his room on his computer when there was a knocking on the door, which is about 10 feet from where he sat. The knocking turned to loud banging and he went over to the door to figure out what was going on. Upon looking through the peep hole, he saw four guys in street clothes with badges and one of them swinging a sledgehammer at our door. They were yelling Chicago Police and telling him to open the door. The door had been hit with the sledgehammer three times by now as my roommate yelled that he was going to open the door. he quickly opened it and the undercover cops busted in brandishing 9mms, putting him up against the wall and pointing at least three of their weapons at his face. He started trying to tell them that he was the only one in the apartment and that they had the wrong apartment number. To explain, the apartments used to be separated by floors but were made into duplexes a few years back. The upstairs door of these ladies of the night still had the old apartment number on it wither intentionally or by accident.

Once realizing that they had the wrong apartment, they kicked in the other door and arrested its inhabitants. Three hookers in all were arrested and taken away. The cops were cool after they had the right people in custody. They told my roommate that there was a prostitution ring that was operating above us and that they had received a tip to raid the apartment. He apologized for the mix up and told him that we should hang a new sign on our door in that hallway. "This is not 2F, No Hand-Jobs Sold Here".

Since then someone has returned to the apartment. We can hear them entering the door and walking around upstairs. I went and met with my property manager yesterday afternoon. Apparently, the first that she had heard of the situation was from me. I am glad that Kass Management is up to date on the illegal activities that happen in their apartment buildings.

I asked if they were going to be evicted and she replied that she had to wait for the police report so that they knew for certain that these things had happened. That's understandable, but come check out the enormous dents in my door from the sledgehammer. She let me know that once she obtained the police report it would take about a month to evict the whores. I think that is ridiculous and I was not pleased. I told her that we wanted our November rent back since my roommate had multiple guns in his face, our door was practically busted in by the cops and that the owners of the building were oblivious to anything. Her response was that it would never happen, but she would speak to the owner of the company, and maybe he would give us $50 or something. I was in awe. She also let me know that things like this happen when you live in the city. But I reminded her that we pay a lot of money to live in a nice part of Lincoln Park. Also that a college kid smoking pot in his apartment or throwing huge noisy parties is something that happens when living in the city. Not a prostitution ring and a police raid on the wrong apartment. I think that this was an extreme situation and that they needed to do something about it. But she offered no help at the time. But she did make me aware that if we left the apartment and broke our lease that they would take us to court and ruin our credit. This is no way to conduct business. She reminded me that they were running a business and they can't just start giving out free rent. Even now, sitting here at my desk, finishing typing this story, I am getting fired up and I want to call and give her another piece of my mind.

My advice for anyone moving to Chicago or anyone looking for a new place. Stay away from Kass Management properties. Also if anyone has any advice on how to get our way with these asshole landlords, I would greatly appreciate it.

And just remember, "This is not 2F, No Hand Jobs Sold Here".

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Back with a Vengeance

For all of you faithful readers out there, I apologize. I have been very busy lately and have not had much time to document life. I also feel that I started getting a little political and that is not my aim here. I strictly want to share my outrageous experiences and shameful thoughts with all of you.

The good news is that I have had quite a week. I just got home from the airport a few hours ago from my latest trip to New York. More has happened in the last week than I would like to admit. This has been one of the weirdest weeks of my life. It has been a test and I made it through with only light bruises and just about $2,200 in wrongful credit card charges that I did not authorize. I am planning on writing a story a day until I am caught up. But to be completely honest I am way to tired to put a decent post together at this time. I have been living off of coffee and adrenaline for the last 5 days and I have a feeling that my body is going to give up on me soon. Even though I think I am supposed to go out on the town tonight and have a football party at my place tomorrow. I am very proud of the fact that I will be taking Monday off to try and rest. But now that is going to be cut short because I need to head over to the landlord's to talk about the police raid and the asian hookers. Yeah, I know, I just caught your interest. That will be tomorrow's story.