Accustomed to Flouting the Law, Port Chester Landlords Look for Loopholes

After two decades of dealing with a corrupt building department that rubber-stamped applications and overlooked serious safety issues, negligent landlords in Port Chester are slowly realizing village government now plays by the rules.

How have they reacted? Code Enforcement Director Christopher Steers paused and considered that question as he stood outside a village hall room packed with years of unorganized and fraudulent files.

"Have you ever seen Jurassic Park, the first one where the raptors are checking the fences for a weakness?" he asked. "That's what they're doing. They're checking the fences for weaknesses."

Among the landlords "checking the fences": Anna Maria Blass, owner of the 142 Oak St. home that caught fire earlier this month. Listed as a three-family building, the home actually housed as many as seven families, according to inspectors who reviewed the property after the fire.

Blass has personally visited village hall several times since then, looking for a pass on the 30 violations the Department of Code Enforcement issued for overcrowding, illegal modifications, exposed electrical wiring and unvented fuel sources, among other issues. 

Her most recent visit was yesterday. Although she's been told she needs to answer the charges in court and hire an architect before she can even begin the process of bringing the house up to code, officials say Blass doesn't want to wait and has sought to rent the home's apartments again less than a month after her 20 former tenants were left homeless in the June 6 fire.

Why the repeated visits to village hall when she's been told she must go through the legal process? Blass isn't the only landlord trying to get a pass.

"They look for a different answer," Steers said, "and they look for a work-around."

Blass is not alone among landlords who are accustomed to dealing with corrupt building department officials willing to look the other way on violations. Indeed, the home Blass owns passed a fire safety inspection in April of 2010 after former Building Inspector Frank Ruccolo vouched for the legality of work performed on the Oak Street house.

Despite the misgivings of a code enforcement inspector, Ruccolo said the building was up to code and free of violations, and the home passed inspection. After the fire, inspectors realized Ruccolo hadn't been truthful -- in addition to the above-mentioned problems, Blass rented an illegal basement area as an apartment, and several modifications had been performed without permits.

Like thousands of other files on parcels within Port Chester, documents corresponding to the home Blass owns reference a Certificate of Occupancy. The certificate has a number that should correspond to a matching file, but the file doesn't exist.

"Nine times out of ten, these numbers refer to nothing," Steers said, pointing to the fabricated number on paperwork approved during Ruccolo's tenure.

Ruccolo was suspended on April 29, 2010, when the Port Chester Police Department raided the building department and closed the office at the outset of a criminal investigation. Three months later, Ruccolo submitted retirement papers in a move that has become a standard in the playbook of disgraced former village employees. By retiring, employees like Ruccolo and former DPW staffers William Oxer and Gary Racaniello have been able to take advantage of a state law that prevents the public from requesting their personnel files. 

Because they are no longer government employees when they hand in their resignation papers, employees who resign in scandal are able to effectively shut down internal investigations and seal off the details of their alleged misconduct.

When Ruccolo resigned in July of 2010, police officials publicly said the investigation would likely take a month. Fourteen months later, the criminal investigation continues, and many Port Chester residents say they worry there will be no accountability. Privately, village officials say the Westchester County District Attorney's Office has blamed a lack of resources for the absence of progress on the investigations. But those officials won't comment publicly because they fear backlash from the district attorney.

Several inquiries with the district attorney's office over the past year have yielded the same answer: the investigation is ongoing, with no timetable for when it may come to a close.

That leaves the village's small code enforcement staff with a long list of formidable tasks, including inspecting some 5,500 parcels in Port Chester, following up on an seemingly endless list of complaints, and cataloguing a mountain of suspect and unorganized paper records that span the 19 year tenure of former Building Inspector Leonard Cusumano and almost a decade under Ruccolo.

As Port Chester's politicians began to realize the scope of the alleged corruption, they gave Steers authority over both the building and code enforcement departments. Now, Steers and his staff have access to building department files -- even files that former staffers said didn't exist.

When Steers arrived in Port Chester as a new hire, Ruccolo and his staff told him thousands of old building department files had been destroyed in a flood. But once he had access to the building department's files, Steers found the missing records stashed in a forgotten file cabinet in village hall.

"This stuff supposedly doesn't exist anymore," Steers said, "but I found it and I'm using it."

On Tuesday, the Board of Trustees will meet for the first time since Trustee Sam Terenzi reviewed some of the old files and declared the village "is ass backwards."

Disgusted by what he saw, and convinced the village's anti-corruption efforts are hindered by the massive task of cataloguing and correcting the old files, Terenzi wants to revive a proposal originally floated more than a year ago. That proposal would set aside at least $100,000 to hire an outside firm to organize, scan and catalog the paperwork, freeing up building inspectors to spend the majority of their time doing what they were hired to do -- inspect homes.

Whether that happens or not, Steers said he wants the public to know the process of correcting such widespread corruption is slow, methodical and labor-intensive. 

"I'm not doing anything new. The only thing I'm doing is actually following the rules," he said. "I'm not reinventing the wheel, I'm just putting the wheels back on."

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