Department 94 is unlike any other courtroom in Los Angeles.
Most courts are quiet, orderly affairs. Parties show up on time and
speak when spoken to. Department 94 is different — one part game show,
one part DMV on a Monday morning.
Located on the seventh floor of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in
downtown L.A., the chamber is the entry point for every single eviction
case in the city.
Rents in Los Angeles have climbed by 25 percent since 2000, according
to a UCLA study, while households' median incomes have actually
declined. That's left L.A. among the least (if not the very least)
affordable cities in which to live in the United States. According to
Zillow, a person making the metro area's median income of $59,000 must
pay 48 percent of his or her paycheck to cover median rent, which is
currently an eye-popping $2,392.
With margins like that, it's easy to fall behind. Some 64,000 to
73,000 people are evicted in L.A. each year — a population equal to that
of Redondo Beach. But before the sheriff shows up at their door with a
padlock, they're called here, to "unlawful detainer" (legalese for
eviction) court. Every day, more than 50 cases move through Department
94.
Each morning begins with a long monologue by Commissioner Robert
Harrison — he's not a judge, but he isn't entirely un-judgelike, a
kindly sort who looks a bit like Daniel Stern in a graying Abraham
Lincoln beard — explaining the rules of the court.
"No live or dead insects please," Harrison calls out with a broad smile. "Please dispose of them in the restroom."
A Spanish translator stands in the middle of the room, talking under
him. All the while people file in and out; the bailiff orders people to
sit down, take off their hats and turn off their cellphones; and lawyers
wander in search of their clients. Many attorneys represent four, five,
six clients a day, and they've often never even met before today.
Confusion reigns.
After explaining the rules, the commissioner reads the names of the
property owners and tenants in each case. The parties then go up two
flights to the court's cafeteria, where they're encouraged to hammer out
a settlement and keep things from going to trial.
If Department 94 is the cattle call, the cafeteria is the meat market.
Tenants and landlords sit awkwardly while lawyers shuttle up and down
the escalators and elevators between multiple clients, often missing one
another by minutes.
The lawyers all know one another — they've been telling bad jokes and bickering for years.
For example: Gary Hoffman, a patrician-looking landlord's attorney who
has been in the business for three decades, timidly approaches Deepika
Sharma, a tenant's attorney with Public Counsel, a pro bono firm. He
smiles. She scowls.
"Is it yes or no, Gary?" she says.
He hesitates, then says, "It's close."
"I'm not taking anything less than what I gave you" earlier, she says. Hoffman slinks away.
"He asked me twice if my softer co-worker is coming in," Sharma says
when Hoffman is out of earshot. "I said, 'No, you have me.' "
"I hate seeing her," Hoffman says later. "She doesn't know what negotiation means."
In the end, most cases settle for either a "pay-and-stay," where the
tenant pays the back rent, often with some sort of payment plan, or a
"no-dough-and-go," where the tenant is given, say, 30 days to leave, and
all back rent is forgiven.
"In today's environment, '30 and a waiver' is wonderful," says
Stephany Yablow, one of the landlord attorneys. "Sixty and a waiver is
fine, too."
Department 94, nearly all of the gray-haired landlords' attorneys
agree, is not what it used to be. A new crop of attorneys has arrived on
scene over the last decade to defend tenants. They're aggressive. They
use every trick in the book to slow down cases, draining money from
landlords, forcing them into less favorable settlements.
The landlords sometimes are forced to pay tenants a move-out fee.
"How do you think it is for us, to try and explain that to our
clients?" Hoffman asks incredulously. " 'The court system has gone
crazy.' That's what I say to them."
It's a new day for landlords trying to evict tenants, and many of them
blame one man in all of the sprawling city: Daniel Bramzon.
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Photo by Ted Soqui
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Landlord attorney Ray Kermani says Danny Bramzon once essentially asked him to “step outside.”
Among eviction attorneys, Danny Bramzon's courtroom swagger is
legendary. He loves to trash-talk the opposition: "I can't wait to
fucking grill [your client] on the stand, I'm gonna take so much
pleasure in it," or "You're going to be so embarrassed when you lose
this case."
Ray Kermani, one of the few younger landlord attorneys on the scene,
says Bramzon once said to him something to the effect of, "Why don't we
step outside?"
"He likes to get in people's heads and likes to say things like that," Kermani says. "It was very unprofessional."
"He's very slimy," agrees Kermani's partner, Mohamad Ahmad. "He'll
call me a lying piece of shit." Although, Ahmad allows, "Since he had a
child, he's kind of calmed down."
"If we're so wrong, why do we win so many cases?" Bramzon asks,
sitting in the bar at downtown's Wokcano on a Tuesday evening. He's
drinking an extra-dirty martini with extra olives, and every so often he
pulls out a small canister of Binaca mouth spray from his breast pocket
and takes a spritz. "Why do we win more cases than any nonprofit
organization? Why do we obtain more money than any nonprofit
organization? Why are we the most feared nonprofit organization?!"
In place of a necktie, Bramzon wears a large necklace with a ceramic,
M-shaped medallion, depicting a serpent and a pyramid, a traditional
icon of pre-Columbian Mexico. Bramzon is from Miami, but his dad is from
Mexico, and Danny lived there for a few years as a kid. His mother is
Jewish and from Philadelphia — "Philly," Bramzon says. There are times
he uses his Philly accent and times he uses his Mexican accent.
Underneath his shirt, Bramzon wears a gold Star of David.
He's reluctant to talk about the dichotomy of the Mexican heritage
worn over his shirt, the Jewish heritage worn underneath. He says only:
"I identify with all my heritage."
Unlike most of the other nonprofit attorneys, Bramzon started
out in a private law firm. In 2005, he was working at the powerhouse
Century City law firm Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil
and Shapiro, now a politically connected firm with a somewhat different
mix of partner names. Bramzon was 27 and, because he often worked late,
he grew friendly with the mostly Hispanic cleaning crew.
One night, one of the cleaning ladies came up to him, holding a piece of paper in her hands.
"Señor Danny," she said, handing him the paper. It was an eviction lawsuit filing.
Bramzon looked into it, researched the case law and helped her reach a
fair settlement with her landlord. Less than a month later, the woman's
cousin came to him. She, too, was being evicted.
"I went to the property on Beverly and Normandie," Bramzon recalls.
"There was a couple of inches of water in this person's living room. And
I swear, there's a bed in the middle of the living room with a girl who
must have been 5 or 6 at the time, on a breathing machine. She had
asthma. The landlord was refusing to fix the ceiling."
By the time he was finished, the mother had been paid $10,000 to move out, and Bramzon had found his calling.
In his Westwood living room, he started Basta — Spanish for "Stop!" or
"That's enough!" — a nonprofit law firm devoted exclusively to
low-income tenants.
Basta wasn't the first firm of its kind. A couple years earlier, a
lawyer named Elena Popp, who had been evicted with her family at the age
of 8, left her longtime job at Legal Aid Foundation Los Angeles to
found the Eviction Defense Network (EDN) with her then-husband.
At the time, some 95 percent of tenants getting evicted either didn't
show up to court or went without representation. Those who didn't show
defaulted. The others, in the words of Popp, "got screwed." They were
forced into settlements hardly better than the initial judgments against
them. Trials were short.
Popp's firm deviated from the model of Legal Aid, which receives
public funding and represents clients pro bono. Both EDN and Basta are
"low bono" — that is, they charge clients a little bit of money, often
on a sliding scale, and take a percentage of the settlement, if there is
any.
"At EDN, we all come from the nonprofit world," Popp says. "Basta
comes from the for-profit world and is better at the business part of
the equation."
Indeed, Basta's business is booming, as Bramzon himself is proud to
admit. It has just hired a 14th lawyer, and it has offices in the
eviction hot spots of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Lancaster. In 2012,
the firm reported $1.5 million in revenue. This year, according to
Bramzon, it will surpass $2 million. According to publicly available tax
forms, Bramzon himself made only $30,000 from his work at Basta in
2012. On the side, he has a small private practice, which he says "pays
the bills."
The landlords and their attorneys bristle at the sheer brazenness of Basta's business model.
While many defense lawyers, like Popp, seek out a settlement with the
landlords' attorneys that gives their clients another month or two to
move out and forgiveness of back rent (a "no-dough-and-go"), Basta
lawyers, by most accounts, refuse to settle unless the landlord pays the
tenant some money, of which Basta takes its 30 percent cut.
Mohamad Ahmad recalls one interaction between him and Basta attorney Ned Harris.
"Ned has told me that straight up: 'You either pay us $2,000 on this
case, or we won't settle," Ahmad says. He claims, "If I say, 'Here's my
settlement offer: one year free rent to your client, or he leaves in two
weeks and I pay $3,000,' [Basta] takes the money. Because they get a
piece."
Other lawyers tell similar stories, although Bramzon insists that the
decision to accept or reject a settlement offer is Basta's clients'
alone.
"It's not just defending the downtrodden," says Dennis Block, whose
firm represents landlords in more eviction cases than any other in L.A.
"It's just such a crock. It's a matter of trying to move money out of
the landlords' pockets to the law firm's pockets."
Bramzon is amused by this. He wonders if the landlords find it easier
to accept paying him, a lawyer, rather than their own impoverished
tenants.
"They can't conceptualize money going to poor people," he laughs.
"Everyone says, 'Oh my gosh, Basta, you're asking for money!' We're not
keeping it, fools! I'm fucking Robin Hood!"
