Bushwick Slumlords Pay Tenants $350K In Settlement: Reports

BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN — Two landlords who forced rent-stabilized tenants to live in squalor and terrorized them with pit bulls and baseball bats must now pay $350,000 in retribution, according to reports.

Amrom and Joel Israel, brother slumlords who pleaded guilty to defrauding and illegally evicting tenants in November, paid up in a Brooklyn supreme court hearing on Wednesday, the Daily News reported.

The settlement came after tenants testified to living in homes without kitchens and bathrooms, finding their homes demolished and being violently forced out of their homes.

Amrom, 39, and Joel, 36, used scare tactics to push out tenants paying $650 to $1,000 a month then raised the rent to $3,500, the Daily News reported.

Zaida Paris, 50, a former tenant forced to live in a shelter away from her children after their apartment was destroyed, will get a check for $68,000, according to DNAinfo New York.

Paris had lived in her 15 Humboldt St. apartment for 19 years with her husband and two children when the bathroom and kitchen were suddenly gutted, Paris said.

When the family was forced onto the street, Paris lost her job, her husband left, and her children were placed in other homes, she said.

Paris cried during the settlement hearing on Wednesday, DNAinfo reported.

"I've never seen that much money before," said Paris. "Things like this don't happen."

The Israel brothers’ attorneys wrote out $250,000 in checks to 10 tenants and a $100,000 check that will go to the state’s Tenant Protection Unit — who promised to help Paris find a two-bedroom apartment — as required by the plea deal in November.

The brothers’ attorney John Carmen told DNAinfo that the brothers had acknowledged their guilt and paid their debts.

But another tenant from Bushwick, Michelle Crespo, 36, disagreed.

Crespo and her family lived in an apartment without a bathroom or kitchen and where rats and stray cats snuck in through massive holes in the floor, DNAinfo reported.

Crespo said she was angry their sentence didn’t include jail time.

“All the families [they] hurt,” Crespo said, “it's not enough."

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