Arthur Davenport says a broken furnace and burst pipes in the home he rented forced him to live without heat or running water. He used a bucket as a toilet.

Sherita Sanders' rental home exposed her children to more than 100 times the level of lead deemed safe. She says there were rats and mold, too.

Porsha Harris describes backed-up drains, opossums falling through the kitchen ceiling and janky wiring that ran up her electricity bills to $700 a month.

Behind all three stories is a tangle of corporations connected to one man: Herbert “Bert” Whalen.

While many of his tenants say they struggled to survive in homes with sewage-filled basements, mold-caked interiors and rotting floors, Whalen lives in a waterfront home at Geist Reservoir once owned by former Gov. Mitch Daniels. It features indoor and outdoor pools, a marble foyer, and a private dock. He also keeps a 51-foot yacht in Florida that the manufacturer describes as "superbly luxurious."

Whalen, 44, came under scrutiny in March after IndyStar reported about his partnership with ex-Fox & Friends host Clayton Morris. Investors have filed lawsuits accusing Morris of running a Ponzi scheme with Whalen's help. Together they sold at least 700 homes in Indianapolis that Whalen's companies went on to manage, according to Morris and court records.

Morris denies the fraud allegations andhas said he merely referred investors to Whalen. He claimed he was not responsible for managing the properties.

Whalen and his attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story, including a list of questions submitted by IndyStar. He has previously denied any wrongdoing in connection with the Morris deals. He has also denied responsibility for injuries and hardships alleged in tenant lawsuits.

An IndyStar investigation into Whalen’s residential empire exposes a chronic problem in the city and state.

Government officials at virtually every level have witnessed a parade of questionable investment schemes and negligent landlords since the housing crisis hit more than a decade ago. Yet they have not only failed to adopt meaningful reforms, they have maintained policies that have made the city an international magnet for such schemes.

State lawmakers have repeatedly killed efforts to hold landlords accountable. County tax collectors continue offering shabby properties to bad landlords dirt cheap. And a city registry is so incomplete it is virtually useless.

And it isn’t just the tenants who pay a high price for cheap rent.

An IndyStar analysis found that Whalen's companies appear to account for more code violations than any other landlord, an average of 2.5 per day in 2018. His properties have amassed nearly 1,800 code violations since 2015, racking up $700,000 in fines — more than $440,000 of which remains unpaid. His companies have also run up tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent taxes.

Property values of neighboring homes are dragged down. Neglected houses are a drain on city services and stymie redevelopment efforts.

This is not just a story of one man’s rise. It’s also the story of the government he enlisted as his silent partner.

Whalen rises from bankruptcy

Seven years ago, Bert Whalen was bankrupt.

A real estate broker since 1995, he had been hit with a $744,000 judgment in a lawsuit over a real estate deal and had racked up a more than $2 million in debt from a lavish lifestyle. He lost his million-dollar home, luxury car and jet ski.

But Whalen continued to buy and sell low-end homes.

In 2015, he connected with Morris and his business exploded. Morris' popular real estate podcast and YouTube channel fueled a massive pipeline of new investors eager to buy into Indianapolis' hot rental market.

To meet the demand, Whalen began snatching up cheap properties at a frenzied pace. He bought them under company names such as Indy Jax, Freeport Invest and variations on Oceanpoint — sometimes ending with an "e," sometimes not.

Those properties — mostly single family homes and duplexes — are in some of the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. The heaviest concentration spans an area between 38th and Washington streets, including the Riverside, Haughville, Near Eastside and Martindale-Brightwood neighborhoods.

The rapid growth of Whalen's businesses, supercharged by Morris, coincided with a growing number of investor and tenant complaints. Missing rent checks. Unexpected code violations. Promised repairs left undone. Fake lease agreements. Phone calls ignored.

Cosmetic repairs hid problems

Unsuspecting renters say Whalen stuffed them into often-crumbling homes. Some were referred by word-of-mouth, others were recruited on Craigslist. Several said they signed their leases in store parking lots.

Many tenants told IndyStar they were deceived by cosmetic repairs, but quickly discovered shocking problems. Some homes didn’t even have the basics, they said. No furnaces. No water meters. No electric lines running to the house.

Heaven Gregory showed an IndyStar reporter how a thin layer of cheap linoleum hid rotting floors and covered over heating vents, effectively creating booby traps she feared her small children would fall through.

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Some tenants said they wanted to get out of the homes, but felt trapped. Prior evictions, criminal records or bad credit prevented some from renting elsewhere. Others said they couldn't afford an additional deposit for a new place.

Meanwhile, tenants say Whalen's companies took a hard line on collecting rent. They were quick to boot residents for late payments or attempting to withhold rent until problems were fixed. Some tenants even reported collection visits from a leasing agent with a handgun strapped to his hip.

Complaints were addressed with much less enthusiasm, according to interviews, lawsuits and public records.

No electricity, ceilings falling in

IndyStar found dozens of Whalen's tenants routinely complained of problems ranging from disgusting to dangerous.

A health inspector cited Whalen in April for 18 code violations at Gregory's house. They included a flooded basement, rotted floors and window frames, crumbling ceilings, rodent infestation, moldy walls and holes in the foundation. The conditions were so bad Gregory said the Department of Child Services threatened to remove her children.

Porsha Harris paid $550 a month for a house Whalen managed for a Morris investor from Colorado. What no one told her is that it had been abandoned for eight years. There weren't even any electrical lines running to the house.

In a lawsuit in which she won a $2,600 judgment against Ocean Point Investment, Harris describes a house of horrors. Improper wiring ran her electricity bills up to $700 a month. There was no furnace. The roof leaked. Then possums fell through her ceiling and into the kitchen, running rampant through the house and devouring her food.

Ocean Point is appealing that case.

April Blythe, a graduate student at IUPUI, said she moved into one of Whalen's rental homes earlier this year only to find the electricity did not work in part of the house. Soon, the grass was two feet high and mold appeared on the ceilings. She said an electrician refused to even go into her attic because it was full of mold. She complained. Whalen's employees left a bottle of mold spray on her doorstep, she said.

When she tried to get out of the lease, according to a text message she shared with IndyStar, Blythe was told she would have to pay $7,800. Eventually the company moved her to another home, but only after learning of a visit from IndyStar, she said.

Rosie Jones said she complained that her furnace smoked, her toddler-aged grandson's foot broke through a rotten bathroom floor and her roof leaked constantly. She had just undergone surgery for breast cancer when the bedroom ceiling caved in as she slept.

“I was like, 'Oh what was that!' I was half asleep, but then I realized (what happened) because it was pouring down rain," she said. "I got up, I called Oceanpoint and they was telling me no one can come out, there’s nothing we can do right now."

Katina Mobley says in a lawsuit that her child, Jonathan, was walking through the house one day when a portion of the ceiling fell and struck him in the head. Oceanpointe Investments Lim denies the allegation, and the case is pending.

A ceiling also collapsed in the rental home of Raniesia Gentillion, according to another lawsuit. The debris buried her teenage son while he slept.

“We could hear my son mumbling for help underneath all the rubble," she said.

He had lower back injuries, bruising and the debris inflamed his asthma, she said. The injuries prevented him from returning to the basketball team at his high school.

The family claims it also suffered without heat for much of the winter, sometimes sleeping in their van to stay warm. The stress, according to the lawsuit, led her daughter to give premature birth to a baby who soon died.

Ocean Point Investments has denied the allegations, and the case is pending.

At Sherita Sanders’ home, the health department found flaking paint and lead dust levels 100 times what is considered safe. Her two young children tested positive for lead poisoning, she said. Lead exposure can cause permanent brain damage.

Sanders sued Ocean Point Property to recover part of her rent, but lost the case. A judge ruled last year she had not incurred any medical expenses. Sanders remains upset about the decision.

"I shouldn’t have to live like this when you’re living good. I'm living horrible; you're living up there in Geist," said Sanders, who has moved to a new home. "It's very wrong."

Clayton Morris partnership falls apart

By January 2018, the state permanently revoked Whalen's real estate license. Regulators found he failed to reveal several arrests on a license renewal application, including three convictions for operating vehicles under the influence. The Indiana Real Estate Commission also cited an allegation that Whalen failed to turn over rent he collected for a property management client.

As investors and tenants began to sue, Morris and Whalen pointed fingers at one another. They severed their relationship in May 2018.

Morris declined an interview request, but in an emailed statement he accused Whalen's companies of mismanaging properties and failing to complete promised rehabs.

"We were sickened to learn of many tenants living in abject conditions," he said.

Despite parting ways with Morris, Whalen continued to manage hundreds of properties and buy up more.

City and county officials couldn't give a full account of the properties owned or managed by Whalen and his companies since 2015. Part of the reason: He doesn't own any property in his own name, instead using at least 10 different company names.

Whalen and Morris also encouraged their passive, out-of-state investors to set up their own limited liability companies, but use Whalen's postal box at a PakMail store near his home as the address of record.

Failures at all levels of government

The claims of trauma from Whalen's tenants raise an obvious question: How does he stay in business given all the lawsuits and code violations?

The answer: In Indianapolis, landlords benefit from a broken system built on weak protections for vulnerable tenants.

It's a crisis that city, county and state leaders have known about, but allowed to persist for years, despite a seemingly endless cycle of complaints about duped investors, deteriorating homes, and victimized tenants.

A 2015 IndyStar investigation, titled "Blight Inc.," addressed one obvious problem: The city's broken tax sale system allows out-of-state investors to swoop in and snatch up large numbers of cheap properties, then rent them out while they decay and collect code violations.

For example:

Mt. Helix, a San Diego company, bought up hundreds of properties, many from the county, and quickly ran up millions of dollars in code violations.

CTL Global purchased at least 85 properties and received 160 violation notices while promising big returns to about 30 investors.

Robert Penn, a former Don Pablos waiter, tricked dozens of Virginia residents into buying more than 100 properties in Indianapolis as part of a multimillion-dollar scam in the early 2000s. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, and many of his properties went into foreclosure or were resold at sheriff's sale.

Some of the properties from those previous schemes later ended up being owned by Whalen's companies, proof of the problem's cyclical nature.

As Mt. Helix was offloading hundreds of properties amid disputed accusations that it had defrauded investors, Whalen signed a $2 million contract to purchase about 100 homes. The broker selling them told IndyStar the properties represented the "bottom of the barrel" of Mt. Helix's dilapidated portfolio.

Mt. Helix's investors are now suing Whalen, saying he collected rent and changed locks on homes even though he never paid forsome of them. Whalen denies the allegations, and the case is pending.

A shoestring investment, big returns

The Mt. Helix contribution to Whalen's portfolio pales in comparison to another source: the office of Marion County Treasurer Claudia O. Fuentes.

Records show the county sold Whalen more than 430 homes and vacant lots at three surplus property auctions from 2017 to 2018, making him the county's largest buyer.

Surplus properties are so undesirable that the county was unable to sell them for the delinquent taxes owed on them. Such properties are sold, often for just a few hundred dollars, at auctions typically held two or three times a year.

Whalen's purchases reveal how a lucrative real estate investment scheme can be funded on a shoestring budget in Indianapolis. Whalen paid the county just $230,000 — less than the average price of two single-family homes in Indianapolis. With Morris' help, he then sold some of those that were vacant lots to investors for nearly $70,000, according to two pending lawsuits.

Aleks Gifford, then-president of the Riverside Civic League, warned city and county officials in 2017 that Whalen's properties had become a plague on his neighborhood. Emails show he questioned why Whalen was allowed to continue purchasing properties from the county despite his companies facing lawsuits and recent tax delinquencies.

"There is not a city official who does not know about this problem, but there is a lot of them who have done not a damn thing," he told IndyStar.

The county continued selling to Whalen.

Indiana code requires buyers to sign a statement affirming they don't owe delinquent taxes or liens from building or health code violations. This would have made Whalen ineligible to bid, but for a glaring loophole.

At the time of a September 2018 auction, Oceanpoint had more than 60 parcels with delinquent taxes and nuisance liens totaling about $80,000, making the company ineligible to bid.

So Whalen signed up as a bidder under a new company name, Indy Jax Properties. It was created just weeks before the auction and has the same address as Oceanpoint. Corporate documents also list Whalen's email address as the point of contact.

Even though the treasurer's office knew Whalen was behind the new company, he was permitted to purchase 27 surplus properties for $21,700.

The treasurer's office said it had no choice under state law.

Judi Jessup, an assistant to Fuentes, said the office could not ban Whalen from bidding on behalf of Indy Jax because neither he personally nor Indy Jax owed any back taxes.

Lax oversight by the city

Whalen also benefited from lax city oversight of the homes his companies rented out.

IndyStar found the city's system for tracking problem landlords is inadequate, with agencies working in silos that make it harder to root out bad landlords.

Neither of the two agencies responsible for issuing housing code violations — the Department of Business & Neighborhood Services and the Marion County Health Department — could tell IndyStar if Whalen was the city's biggest code violator.

Another tool that should help protect renters, a city landlord registry created in 2015, is incomplete and ineffective, IndyStar found. City leaders have known this for years, in part because of cases involving Oceanpointe Investments.

After city officials cited Oceanpointe Investments for tall weeds, trash and a collapsing roof in 2016, they discovered a loophole that allowed the company to escape the $500 penalty for failing to register the properties with the city.

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In direct response, the City-County Council in 2017 adopted new regulations intended to enforce the registration requirement.

But if the city's current landlord registry is any evidence, that effort has failed. Whalen and his companies show up on the registry in connection with only a single property.

Mayor Joe Hogsett's office declined to make him available for an interview. Instead, his deputy chief of staff, Taylor Schaffer, responded to a list of emailed questions from IndyStar.

She acknowledged that enforcing the city's registry requirement is challenging. It can be hard to determine if a property is being rented, she said, and "an unscrupulous landlord has ample opportunity to deny the property is actually for rent."

She also said state lawmakers have restricted the authority of cities to address problem landlords and ensure rental units are habitable.

"Indiana has historically been a state that prioritizes the rights of property owners and landlords," she said. "That means that there are very few tools at the city’s disposal to intervene."

Restricting cities from stepping in

Indeed, state lawmakers have effectively neutered local efforts to crack down on bad actors.

Indiana law requires landlords to provide "habitable" homes, but does not require cities to inspect them before they are occupied.

Pre-rental inspections are required in many other states and cities to ensure properties include functioning heating, electrical and plumbing systems. But Indiana legislators took a different approach. In 2014 they greatly restricted such inspections by capping the fee cities can charge at $5. As a result, most simply don't do it.

Rep. Chris Campbell, a West Lafayette Democrat, tried earlier this year to eliminate the cap and require inspections statewide.

She learned quickly that many lawmakers were opposed to that safeguard. In fact, she said many were rental property owners themselves. Her bill never even got a hearing.

"That cap was created because they thought nobody could work within that," she told IndyStar. "You can’t inspect any property for $5."

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Another bill that never got a hearing would have allowed tenants to withhold rent and apply it to repairs if landlords refused to fix major problems. At least 19 states provide similar options.

But in Indiana, tenants must keep paying rent even if they have a hole in the roof or a broken furnace. Their only recourse is to take their landlord to court — a potentially costly and time-consuming endeavor that many low-income residents simply can't afford.

"That's not fair," said Sen. Eddie Melton, D-Gary, who carried the bill.

Jones, the cancer survivor who said her roof collapsed, said landlords have far too much power.

“They need to be got. Somebody needs to do something about them, because they want to treat people any old kind of way and it’s not right," she said. "They won’t come out and fix nothing, but as soon as you don’t pay your rent, they want to talk and then they get smart with you on the telephone."

Complaining can backfire

One of the only other options for renters stuck in dangerous homes is to call the Marion County Health Department. But that can backfire.

When Arthur Davenport called the health department, an inspector found leaky plumbing, a broken furnace and several other violations at the home managed by Oceanpointe Investments. Davenport said Citizens Energy turned off the gas because of the leak. His insulin froze. He had to buy jugs of water at Kroger and use a bucket as a toilet, emptying it at a nearby gas station.

Ultimately, the health department asked a judge to order him out. Now, he is squatting in abandoned homes or sometimes sleeping on the streets.

While an eviction order can be devastating to a renter, it doesn't guarantee a landlord will be forced to fix their property. Once the tenant who filed the complaint is gone, the health department typically closes the case.

It's a practice that provides a "perverse incentive" for landlords to evict tenants who file complaints, said Chase Haller, a housing attorney with the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic.

"Once the tenant is out," explained Haller, "they are free to re-let the premises to the next unsuspecting tenant, often without remedying the underlying problems with the property."

And the cycle continues.

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Contact Tim Evans at 317-444-6204 or tim.evans@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @starwatchtim.

Contact IndyStar reporter Tony Cook at 317-444-6081 or tony.cook@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @IndyStarTony.