The invaluable Alec MacGillis, now doing god's work at ProPublica, has an anger-making story about some tenants in Baltimore who appear to be the victims of the worst landlord since Cromwell parceled out Mayo to his soldiers. Here's one example. A woman rented a place in this development and her next door neighbor was more than a little batty.

She began accosting Warren's visitors. She shouted through the walls during the day. And at night she banged on the wall, right where Warren kept the bassinet in which her third child slept, waking him up.

Fed up, the woman decided to move. She gave the proper notice and filled out all the proper paperwork. (She was a client of the federal Section 8 housing program for poorer tenants.) And she moved. And then this happened.

So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease's expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn't recognize: JK2 Westminster LLC.

Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor's degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster's lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney's fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. "I was so desperate," she said.

There is, of course, a punchline coming.

If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real-estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.

The grift runs deep in this family. Once, here in the shebeen, we used to say that, to the Romneys, there were only two kinds of people: the Romneys and The Help. To the extended Trump clan, it appears there also are only two types of people: the Trumps and The Carrion. And young Jared has a buzzard's eye for the latter.

That June, the company and its equity partners bought 4,681 units of what are known in real-estate jargon as "distress-ridden, Class B" apartment complexes: units whose prices fell somewhere in the middle of the market, typically of a certain age and wear, whose owners were in financial difficulty.

And, naturally, there are lesser parasites dining on what the buzzard leaves behind.

The vast majority of these cases have been filed by a single small law firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills. The law office of Jeffrey Tapper specializes in "collections" work, with an emphasis on landlord-tenant cases. It has represented several other real-estate management companies, including Sawyer, which retains a stake in many of the Kushner complexes. In April, I drove to Owings Mills in hopes of speaking to Tapper. As I waited for him by reception, I overheard an assistant making a call about a new case, saying that the firm would continue to pursue one tenant even if the other person on the lease had filed for bankruptcy.

There literally is nobody working on the Kushner side of this story that would not force you to take a decontamination shower if you passed them on the street, let alone had to meet them in court. The process-servers are an embarrassment to the lawyers, who are an embarrassment to Kushner, who is an embarrassment to humanity.

In March 2009, Joan Beverly, a probation agent, signed the lease for her daughter, Lennettea, for a unit at Dutch Village, a complex on the northern edge of Baltimore. Lennettea moved out a year later, several months before her lease was up. Kushner Companies bought Dutch Village more than two years later. In December 2012, JK2 Westminster filed suit in Baltimore County District Court against Beverly, seeking $3,810.16 — several months of rent it said it was owed, plus about $1,000 in repair costs, including $10 for "failure to return laundry room card."

That February, Lennettea filed a written court notice explaining that her mother, who was dying of pancreatic cancer, was "in terminal hospice care and is not eligible to work." She added by way of supporting evidence a letter from the hospice provider to Joan Beverly's bank, explaining her and her husband's late mortgage payments on their home: "There has been added financial stress because Mrs. Beverly is very ill at this time." But JK2 Westminster persisted in seeking a hearing on the suit. In March, a district court judge found in favor of the company — a total judgment against Joan of more than $5,500. Joan died two weeks later. Her husband, Tyrone Beverly...told me that he had assumed the judgment had been dismissed and was unaware that it was still listed as awaiting payment. "They just didn't treat us fair," he said.

But, of course, Jared's company is fine to deal with, as long as you pay the rent. Except, maybe not.

The worst troubles may have been those described in a 2013 court case involving Jasmine Cox's unit at Cove Village. They began with the bedroom ceiling, which started leaking one day. Then maggots started coming out of the living room carpet. Then raw sewage started flowing out of the kitchen sink. "It sounded like someone turned a pool upside down," Cox told me. "I heard the water hitting the floor and I panicked. I got out of bed and the sink is black and gray, it's pooling out of the sink and the house smells terrible." Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs...When I told her of Kushner's involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.

"Get that [expletive] out of here," she said.

The country feels much the same way.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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