Frank McHugh had been warned repeatedly that the railings on a third-floor walkway at one of his apartment buildings were so widely spaced that children could fall through.
Concerned for their kids, tenants used wire coat hangers to rig their own safety guards. McHugh left the problem unfixed until one day in October 1991, when 18-month-old Edgar Repreza plunged through the gap and slammed into the concrete about 20 feet below, suffering permanent brain damage.
"His brother, who was about 5 at the time, saw him fall," said Alison Baird, the lawyer who obtained a settlement of more than $1 million for the family. "It was terrible."
Despite the big payout, and the tragic consequences for a little boy and his family, the 1991 incident did not end a pattern of repeated health and safety violations at McHugh's buildings. Nor did it or other incidents spur public officials to force him to significantly change his practices.
For more than 50 years, McHugh, 84, has bought apartment buildings mostly in Los Angeles' poorer neighborhoods and filled them primarily with immigrant tenants. And for at least a generation, he has been investigated, cited and denounced by city and county officials. Almost three decades ago, then-City Atty. Ira Reiner accused McHugh of dealing in "blood money" and threatened to send him to jail.
But McHugh continued to buy more properties and build an ever-longer record of flouting health and safety codes.
Prosecutors say McHugh told them last summer that he owned more than 140 Los Angeles properties, which by various estimates housed more than 8,000 people. Many of his buildings have fallen prey to rats, cockroaches and mold, and are plagued by inoperative plumbing and rotting ceilings that cave in with regularity, according to court records.
Now, city prosecutors once again are seeking to shut McHugh down. In 2007, they charged him with multiple fire and health code violations. As part of a plea deal, he agreed last fall to sell all of his Los Angeles rentals within three years. The deal allowed him to avoid jail time.
McHugh, of Marina del Rey, has declined repeated interview requests. His lawyer, Harold Greenberg, says McHugh is complying with the court order and that he has been targeted unfairly by authorities.
His tenants and their advocates say they are waiting to see whether this latest attempt at enforcement will work, some expressing skepticism because of a long history of ineffective enforcement involving McHugh's buildings.
In January, the front half of a Koreatown four-plex that the city Housing Department had signed off on as habitable nine months earlier suddenly collapsed. Four people suffered minor injuries and more than 20 were left homeless.
In the 2007 violations, city housing inspectors had cleared one of two buildings as habitable, only to have health and fire officials come in months later and find violations serious enough to put McHugh in jail.
The failure to regulate him effectively goes back decades.
It was in April 1982 that Reiner blasted McHugh as one of five "heavy hitters" among Los Angeles slumlords.
"We aren't talking about landlords who are just in over their heads, unable to maintain a building properly," Reiner said at the time. "We are talking about men in the slum business. Men who buy slums and maintain slums. . . . People who deal in blood money."
Reiner pledged to send McHugh and the other landlords to jail, saying no other penalty would work. "For them," he said, "a fine is merely a cost of doing business."
But a fine is what McHugh got. On Oct. 25, 1982, according to records from the city attorney's office, McHugh pleaded guilty and received a fine of $500 per count. The city attorney's handwritten notes on the case do not indicate how many counts he faced, and court records are incomplete.
Other subsequent attempts to prosecute him on misdemeanor charges had similarly minimal effects, records show.
In 2003 he was prosecuted again, for fire code violations, but the charges were dismissed. A year later, he pleaded guilty to charges stemming from habitability violations, paid less than $1,000 in fines and took a "property management course" on how to be a better landlord.
"He's played the system like a violin for many, many years," said UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, who helped craft Los Angeles' slum housing laws and who has known of McHugh for years. "He is really good."
Greenberg said his client has thus far sold 20 to 30 properties. He also said his client has been demonized by tenants and advocacy groups.
"He's an easy target. He's an old man," said Greenberg, who contends that many of the problems in McHugh's buildings are the result of tenant neglect and illegal overcrowding.
"You know how many tenants have been prosecuted? Zip," he said. "They go after the landlords, not the tenants. Everybody talks about slumlords. Who talks about the tenants from hell, tenants who literally destroy things?"
