Jury slaps Milwaukee landlord with $20K judgment as city ramps up efforts to push him out of business

It was a bad week for Elijah Mohammad Rashaed, the notorious landlord who the city is trying to push out of Milwaukee's real estate business.

On Monday, the City Attorney's Office asked a Milwaukee County circuit judge to push up the timetable to strip Rashaed of control of his central city real estate empire. 

Rashaed agreed in October to sell 166 properties owned by companies owned or linked to him. The city agreed to give him until May to complete the sales, but is now asking to move up the timetable after it learned a deal to sell 115 Rashaed-linked properties fell through, according to a Feb. 13 letter from Kail Decker, assistant city attorney.

"As a result, 152 parcels appear to be unsold and not under contract" for sale, Decker wrote to Judge Glenn Yamahiro. "The City provided as much latitude to the defendants as possible by setting the hearing date on its motion out almost four months while the properties were under contract to be sold."

The judged quickly scheduled a hearing for this Friday.

"I plan to recommend that the property manager take over" on Friday, Decker said.  "Unless the sale (of the properties) is all but guaranteed I cannot think of any reason to ask the court to delay the appointment of a property manager."

Naming a property manager would be akin to placing Rashaed's holdings in receivership. The manager would control the properties and the revenue they produce.

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Just two days after Decker wrote Yamahiro, a jury in a different Milwaukee County courtroom ordered Rashaed to pay $20,000 in punitive damages because the landlord acted maliciously and/or showed "an intentional disregard of the rights" of a tenant who rented from a company linked to him.

Tenants Deshawn Jewell and Socorra Fields charged — and the jury agreed — that Rashaed was negligent in the upkeep of the rental unit that resulted in "a piece of the roof to dislodge" in May 2014, injuring Fields and her infant daughter. 

In addition, the couple charged, they had to deal with a variety of other issues — including plumbing problems and wildlife getting into the duplex — which they said made their duplex unit on the 2000 block of N. 34th St. uninhabitable. 

"There were mice, all kinds of caterpillars," Jewell testified at a 2014 hearing.  "It was wintertime when we moved in. (There were) flies everywhere, just coming in out of nowhere. Like I killed over a thousand flies living there like every day."

Lawyers who deal with housing issues said the punitive award is large for a case involving a landlord-tenant dispute. 

"This is one of the larger amounts I've ever seen in (a landlord-tenant case) in 20 years in Milwaukee County," said Michael Maistelman, an attorney who frequently deals with housing issues. 

Vincent Bobot, a former municipal court judge, agreed, saying "$20,000 is a hefty sum of money against a landlord in a situation like this." 

In addition, the jury awarded Jewell and Fields $7,500 in damages to compensate for losses.

Jeffrey Myer, the couple's Legal Action of Wisconsin attorney, said he will argue that some, and possibly all, of the compensatory damages be doubled because the actions of Rashaed and New Pride Property LLC violated state unfair trade practices law.

Myer said he would also ask the court to order Rashaed and the LLC to pay attorney fees and costs to Legal Action and Georgia Konstantakis, a private lawyer who initially brought the case.

"The neglect by the landlords was significant," Myer said.

David Halbrooks, Rashaed's lawyer, hung up on a reporter and would not answer questions on the lawsuit or the city attorney's action.

Court records show Rashaed repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

The Jewell lawsuit started in 2014 when New Pride, which owned the property, sought to evict Jewell and Fields from the upper level of the duplex they rented for $675 a month in 2013.

Jewell and Fields filed a counterclaim charging the property was uninhabitable and that they were withholding rent in accordance with city programs — though Rashaed said he was never notified of the withholding action. 

Court records "contain evidence of longstanding, unremedied, deplorable housing code violations," Myer wrote in a 2017 brief. For example, there were 44 building code violations noted in September 2013 that were not repaired for more than two years, Myer wrote.

The property is owned by New Pride, a limited liability company that, according to a 2014 filing with state regulators, was at least partially owned by Mariama Rashaed, Elijah Rashaed's daughter.

Mariama Rashaed had been New Pride's registered agent, though state records now list an employee of Elijah Rashaed as the registered agent and states that the LLC is based at 2976 N. King Drive — the headquarters for Elijah Rashaed's extensive real estate and property management operation. 

In a 2016 affidavit, Elijah Rashaed said he had no "personal relationship" with New Pride and that he only provided management services through his Horizon Real Estate Management LLC. A Journal Sentinel story in 2015 showed Rashaed was linked to at least 50 limited liability corporations, a setup that allows owners to keep their identities secret and protect personal assets from liabilities.

The jury, however, said Elijah Rashaed was an agent of New Pride and was responsible for payment of 40% of the compensatory damages.