Since winning the Republican nomination for U.S. House last month, Scott Walker has been disavowed by his own party, lambasted by Democrats and turned into a punchline on social media.

Being attacked and ostracized is nothing new for the 67-year-old Milford resident, who stands one victory away from representing Delaware in Congress.

A horticulturalist turned landlord, Walker spent years losing court battles with state, county and municipal officials over a real estate business he once promoted as a solution to Delaware’s lack of affordable housing for the destitute, addicted and mentally ill.

Walker eventually was forced to give up the nearly two dozen properties he operated – due either to foreclosure or pressure from the Delaware Attorney General’s Office.

Along the way he racked up hundreds of building code violations, launched numerous lawsuits, was evicted from one property after another and declared bankruptcy.

Yet, here he is, about to face incumbent Lisa Blunt Rochester in the Nov. 6 general election after a shocking primary win that might owe as much to mistaken identity as his homemade political signs.

"I don't have any revenge in my heart," Walker said. "I've become very religious lately and the time for that has passed. I will say I'm very satisfied being here but now I've got bigger fish to fry."

That’s a far cry from where Walker found himself just weeks ago: largely dismissed as a political nobody, a characterization aided by his 2016 run for Congress as a Democrat in which he finished fifth out of six primary candidates.

As a Republican, Walker pulled off what no one expected, including himself. He won nearly 19,600 votes in September to defeat the state party’s preferred candidate Lee Murphy.

In the weeks since, a sizable online community has sprung up to jeer and mock Walker’s outlandish Facebook posts, including his screeds against white bread, a video secretly recorded inside an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a video of him running on the beach in a tiny bathing suit and his repeated claims that Delaware’s elected officials are racist.

The Delaware GOP – embarrassed by Walker’s outlandish Facebook posts – vowed to withhold any assistance to the candidate.

Walker’s real estate troubles and the lengthy court fights they produced have been widely ignored, however.

Yet there might be no one more surprised by Walker’s primary victory than the former tenants who paid him $400 a month for space in what authorities have described as squalid, overcrowded tenements that he sometimes continued to rent after they had been condemned or sold at sheriff sale.

'The Landlord'

Walker today describes his real estate venture as a virtuous undertaking created with the sole mission of providing inexpensive housing, counseling services and employment opportunities to some of the state’s most vulnerable residents – all without credit checks, security deposits or, in some cases, written leases.

“I was providing the most basic form of housing in America: the room for rent,” he wrote in his unpublished memoir “The Landlord,” a copy of which he provided to The News Journal.

“My tenants chose to live in my houses,” he states in the 70-page book. “They came to me and asked for a room. Sometimes begged. They looked at the house, the room, the neighborhood, the price and chose to move in. Many wanted to live free and unencumbered by rules and authority. Many just wanted to come in off the streets.”

Walker contends his good deeds were met with endless persecution in the form of intimidation, harassment, interference and retaliation from neighbors and government officials he claims were obsessed with destroying the racially mixed “families” he was forging out of the state’s forgotten and neglected residents.

Two former tenants of Walker – both women who are now in recovery – said the houses were billed to them and their families as recovery or sober living homes. At the time, both women were actively using drugs and now say they had nowhere else to go.

But those "rooms" turned out to be partitioned sections of larger rooms Walker rented out to male and female tenants, including drug users, sex offenders and formerly incarcerated people, they say.

Nicole Petrucci, who lived at 123 Prospect Drive – owned by Walker's son, Matthew, but managed by Walker – said she was kicked out after a man fatally overdosed there. Petrucci said Walker believed she was partially responsible for the man's death because she was actively using heroin at the time.

But what remains a vivid memory for Petrucci was the man being carried out of the house through her bedroom in a body bag.

"It doesn't seem like he cared about anyone," said another woman, who rented a room from Walker. "It wasn't about helping somebody else."

Hundreds of court documents from foreclosure proceedings, federal inquiries and a dozen lawsuits also raise questions about how much help Walker was actually providing.

They depict a man who consistently ignored building codes, zoning regulations and court-imposed fines, who leveled wild accusations against inspectors and tenants, and who defrauded the public with an illegitimate charity designed to mask his misdeeds.

“You have indisputably operated unlicensed group homes providing sub-standard housing to County citizens, exploited the County’s most vulnerable citizens, and abused the judicial process,” former New Castle County Solicitor Darryl Parson wrote in a 2014 letter to Walker. “You will not be rewarded for these hostile actions.”

By all accounts, Walker’s odyssey into real estate began sometime around 2002 when he and three of his four children – including his daughter J’Amie Leonard Walker, now an assistant public defender – began buying up New Castle County properties and renting them out for profit.

Over time, the family owned or operated 23 illegal group homes and rooming houses, according to court documents.

"It's a mistake to say my kids went along with this willing," Walker said. "They didn't know anything about real estate and I talked them into buying property. I twisted their arms."

When the Great Recession struck in 2008, the banks began to foreclose on the homes, sometimes for mortgage payments years overdue.

After some were sold at sheriff’s sale, Scott Walker – whose real name is Russell – filed paperwork with the state in late 2010 to create the Disabled Disadvantaged Delawareans Foundation, a legal entity that took ownership of several properties then in the family’s possession.

For years, Walker would describe the 3D Foundation as a nonprofit dedicated to providing affordable housing and mental health services.

Yet he never registered the foundation as nonprofit with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. He never filed any corporate tax returns. He repeatedly failed to file annual franchise tax reports. He never received a license from the state to operate a group home. And he failed to file any state personal income taxes after the foundation was created.

Over the years, he would alternately describe himself as the foundation’s president, CEO, trustee, executive director, board member and employee. But he consistently ignored basic requirements of any nonprofit by failing to reinvest revenue back into the foundation.

“3D is not a charitable concern in any sense,” lawyers with the state attorney general’s fraud division would later contend. “It is a mere sham.”

State prosecutors would contend that did not stop Walker from seeking donations he claimed would be tax deductible, an allegation he vehemently denies.

Almost immediately after the 3D Foundation was formed, the properties it and the Walker family controlled began to rack up dozens of code violations a year, resulting in thousands of dollars in unpaid fines.

By 2016, Walker had amassed 371 code violation, his son Matthew received 87 for just one property and Walker’s other daughter Jillian collected another 30, court documents show.

Walker's two daughters declined to comment on this story. His son could not be reached.

A number of those violations pertained to overcrowding, with eight to 12 people living in homes legally allowed to house four thanks to kitchens, hallways, crawl spaces and garages being separated into multiple living spaces with shower curtains and blankets.

Other violations related to faulty appliances, faulty electrical systems, insect infestations, defective stairs, standing water, missing smoke detectors and “improper disposal of human fecal matter.”

Raw sewage that backed up into the basement of a home in Claymont was pumped out of a window into the backyard, “where wads of toilet paper and human feces accumulated,” court documents show.

State lawyers asserted another property in Wilmington had an inoperable plumbing system that resulted in tenants disposing of their urine and feces in buckets stored in the kitchen.

Walker continued to rent the homes, even as foreclosures mounted and several properties were condemned, according to court records. But it was mismanagement and the refusal of some tenants to pay rent that eventually forced him to seek bankruptcy protection in 2011.

Soon after, Walker began to fight back by filing numerous lawsuits against the county and municipal governments and submitting formal discrimination complaints to the Delaware Human Relations Commission and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Acting as his own lawyer, Walker would consistently allege code enforcement officers and other government officials were unfairly targeting him and his “disabled” residents in violation of the U.S. Constitution, as well as state and federal housing laws.

'Reasonable accommodation'

At the crux of Walker’s complaints was an insistence that his properties should be exempt from rules limiting the number of tenants. He argued the refusal of various government agencies to consider his tenants as a single family unit limited how many people could split the rent.

Yet Walker never formally sought variances. Instead, he and some of his tenants would occasionally mail vague letters to individual officials seeking undefined “reasonable accommodations.”

None of the legal actions Walker pursued ever produced the results he was seeking.

The HUD complaint he and the 3D Foundation filed in early 2012 against New Castle County led federal investigators to conclude county officials had done no wrong.

They also note finding some residents staying on couches and others sleeping in a dining room, a porch, a garage and a basement.

“It appears the code violations issued to Mr. Walker by NCC were warranted,” the HUD investigators state in their final report. “[T]he investigation revealed that neither the Complainant nor Mr. Walker followed the local zoning process for obtaining a variance.”

Despite those findings, Walker in March 2013 filed a lawsuit against the county in Superior Court, claiming code enforcement officials and others were conspiring to ruin him. The case ground on for two years before Walker withdrew the lawsuit only to refile it in U.S. District Court, where it later was dismissed.

In May 2013, he filed a similar lawsuit against Wilmington in Chancery Court after city officials forced his tenants out of a row house that had been condemned years earlier. That case also was dismissed.

By the end of 2013, Walker also was suing the city of New Castle and others over his tenants being evicted from a home he was renting after it had been sold at a sheriff’s sale. The city had declared the property a public nuisance due to a cockroach and bed bug infestation, court records show.

One of Walker’s only legal victories came as a result of that case.

The suits against New Castle County and the city of New Castle were being heard by the same judge, who at some point believed they were one and the same and dismissed both simultaneously.

Walker appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court, which remanded the city of New Castle case back to Superior Court. A few months later, Walker wrote a letter to New Castle’s lawyer referencing a $7,000 settlement he rejected in favor of “a number in the $50,000 range.”

The case was settled soon after for an undisclosed amount.

Two weeks later, Walker paid the $3,480 filing fee to become a Democratic candidate for U.S. House.

Government intervention

Walker and at least one of his children attempted to launch several other lawsuits over the years. Some were rejected because they failed to pay the filing fee and some were tossed for being frivolous.

One lawsuit filed against the county in U.S. District Court was settled in 2017. Walker claims that deal required New Castle County to waive $40,000 worth of pending fines.

His streak of filing new litigation finally came to halt, however, after the state, county and Wilmington jointly filed a lawsuit against Walker and the 3D Foundation a month after the 2016 primary.

The suit accused him of consumer fraud, maintaining a public nuisance, and other “deceptive and predatory actions [that] pose immediate and significant risks to the health, safety and welfare of the public.”

By then, most of the properties owned by Walker and his family had been foreclosed on and sold off. But he and the 3D Foundation still controlled six group homes in Wilmington that collectively housed close to 70 tenants.

Walker denied every allegation and insisted the lawsuit was merely retaliation for his legal actions against racist government “stormtroopers”

“The physical appearance of the racially mixed residents of the Defendant were the actual, truthful so called ‘nuisance’ quality of the homes that the Plaintiffs claim depressed 'the value and character of the surrounding neighborhoods,'” he wrote.

Despite his protests, Walker quickly agreed to a settlement that required him to withdraw his remaining lawsuits and waive all claims to the 3D Foundation. He also was barred from renting property or having any involvement with a nonprofit for 10 years under the threat of a $100,000 court penalty.

The foundation was placed into receivership and its five remaining properties were boarded up.

In response to a subpoena demanding financial records from the 3D Foundation, Walker supplied a handwritten letter that came as close as he would ever get to admitting the allegations against him.

“3D Foundation doesn’t exist as a functioning entity and never operated as a charity or a nonprofit conforming to Delaware laws,” it stated. “There are no records available … I request you stop pursuing this.”

The court receiver tasked with selling off 3D Foundation’s properties later reported the corporate entity owed nearly $58,000 in unpaid city taxes, roughly $15,000 in unpaid school taxes and about $1,600 in unpaid county taxes.

Three of the properties were sold off in 2015.

The final two were approved for sale by the courts on Sept. 7, one day after Walker won the Republican primary for U.S. House.

"I have no animosity about all that because it probably saved my life," Walker said of the lawsuit. "But when you get hit you either stay down or you start swinging leather. That's what I've done and I'm blessed the voters chose me to be their candidate."

Since then, various theories have been put forward to explain Walker's victory.

Some political watchers have noted he shares a name with the governor of Wisconsin, a nationally known Republican who briefly pursued a presidential bid.

Some cite the fact that Walker never removed his political signs after the 2016 primary, giving him with two years worth of advertising that also generated thousands of dollars in unpaid fines.

Others blame Lee for completely discounting Walker and choosing to save his energy and financial resources for what he assumed would be a walk into a general election contest against Blunt Rochester.

Instead, the first black and first female elected to Congress from Delaware will face Walker, who still has no campaign staff and has yet to file a single finance report with the Federal Election Commission.

Walker’s future will be determined by Delaware voters. But Petrucci, his former tenant, says he still needs to be held accountable for his past.

"There are a lot of people's lives you have negatively affected," she said of Walker. "You need to make amends for that and acknowledge what you did."

Reporter Brittany Horn contributed to this article.

Contact reporter Scott Goss at (302) 324-2281, sgoss@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ScottGossDel.

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