Gunning for Slums : Deputy City Attorney Puts Law on the Side of Low-Income Renters

The preliminary hearing in Department 59 of Los Angeles Superior Court last week looked like a mismatch.

On one side, Deputy City Atty. Stephanie Sautner sat with three other lawyers, representing impoverished tenants and the people of the State of California in a ground-breaking “civil racketeering” suit against more than 100 alleged slumlords and the lending institutions that funded them.

On the other side, four heavy-artillery type lawyers from big firms argued for the defense, backed by another 24 attorneys and assistants for various defendants, who sat in the gallery intently scribbling notes in yellow legal pads.

But anyone who thinks Sautner and her team were outgunned might heed a story making the rounds in legal circles.

When Sautner was hired by the City Attorney’s office in 1984, she went through a routine orientation, including a tour of the Police Academy. Standard procedure is to ask the least likely woman in a visiting group to take a crack at the simulator--a realistic film of a crime scene, used to teach cops how to react to attacks.

Invariably, the results embarrass a neophyte shooter but amuse and enlighten those watching.

“Have you ever held a gun before, little lady?” the training officer asked Sautner.

She looked at him sheepishly. He handed her the Smith & Wesson .38. She fumbled it. She couldn’t find the trigger.

With enormous patience, the amused officer pointed her in the direction of the simulator. Promptly, a swarm of ominous scumbags burst onto the screen. Sautner crouched and opened fire.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

The patronizing training officer watched as Sautner--who in a previous life had been a New York City police detective--nailed each of the mock perpetrators squarely in a part of the anatomy exclusive to males.

Colleagues who work with Sautner, and attorneys who have opposed her, say her street smarts have a lot to do with the fact that the slum housing task force she heads has a 100% conviction rate against slumlords.

The windows in Sautner’s 16th-floor office in City Hall East haven’t seen a squeegee in years. But even through the grime, the vantage point makes Los Angeles look like a city of sparkling glass towers capped with bright corporate logos.

Follow Sautner down from this perch and into the streets, however, and there’s another city in the shadows of the gleaming skyline.

There’s a brick building on Carondelet Street, for example, that has been thoroughly autographed by Droopy and Mouser and gangsters with equally colorful monikers. Rap music blasts with in-your-face insolence from a window displaying the bare back of an inert young man. Meanwhile, a young girl smiles sweetly from a basement window.

The scene, as Sautner sees it through locked security gates, encapsulates the problem: With the shortage of cheap housing in Los Angeles, what few apartments are available tempt vermin of all species.

“I don’t consider myself a Pollyanna,” she said. “I go into some apartments and say, ‘This person’s a slob. . . .’ There are gang members and drug dealers in these buildings. But there are also a lot of very poor families, babies, children playing in hallways.”

A Moral Obligation

Landlords have a moral obligation to kick out the slobs and the thugs who terrorize other tenants. But it’s the legal obligation they have to keep their buildings safe and decent that concerns Sautner.

So it is that each Wednesday, Sautner and her colleagues on the task force meet with liaisons from the City Fire Department, the Department of Building and Safety and the Health Department to discuss what inspectors have found at low-rent buildings around the city.

To make the task force list, a building must be three or more stories high and “violate all three agencies’ codes substantially,” Sautner said.

When a building becomes “task force,” the agencies give the owner 30 days to start fixing problems. Landlords who fail to begin repairing the unsafe wiring and broken plumbing, exterminating the rats, or doing whatever else is needed to bring their buildings up to code, are hit with criminal charges for jeopardizing tenants’ health and safety.

The building on Carondelet Street, along with another a block away, have been on the list for about a month. At the second building, a 14-year-old girl let Sautner through a security gate and into a dimly lit entrance way.

“Has the landlord been doing any repairs?” Sautner asked.

“No,” the girl replied. She then recited a litany of complaints. The manager, for instance, won’t let the children who live in building’s 50 or so tiny apartments play in the halls.

A good thing, perhaps, considering that on at least one floor, a child might easily toddle down the unlighted hall, over the exposed floor and sub-floor, through a doorway with no door and onto an exposed fire escape, free-falling through a large hole to the dirt lot below.

The girl led Sautner into the studio apartment she shares with her mother and three other relatives. There was a sewing machine in the tiny kitchen where a pot of frijoles simmered. Scruffy stuffed animals decorated the walls. In the small bathroom, the girl pointed to a basketball-sized hole in the ceiling and observed: “A whole bunch of roaches come down through there sometimes.”

Sautner was born and raised in Rockaway Beach, N.Y.

“I guess we were poor, but it’s hard to think of yourself as poor when your back yard is the ocean,” she said.

Sautner attended parochial schools in the blue-collar, Irish Catholic town until her junior year, when she transferred to Thorpe Secretarial High School in Manhattan, taking the 6:30 a.m. train through Queens and Brooklyn to make 8:30 a.m. classes.

That was her first glimpse of life beyond Rockaway, and playing hooky often became an irresistible temptation, she said. “We’d report the deaths of various relatives that didn’t exist.”

College wasn’t an option for Sautner after high school. Her father had left and didn’t send child support. Her mother got a job as a typist, and Sautner landed a job as a secretary with a Wall Street investment firm. Together they made enough to support the family.

In Rockaway, there was only one way of thinking: “You go to high school, get a job, and go to the local bar on Friday night,” Sautner said. “None of the kids went on to college. None read interesting books or listened to music other than rock ‘n’ roll.”

For Sautner, though, exposure to rock and folk music was enough to suggest there were other ways to look at the world. An avid Joan Baez fan, she got involved in the anti-war movement, and in 1969, took off for Palo Alto, Calif., to spend a month studying at Baez’s Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. “I met the sort of people there I’d never been exposed to,” she said.

Before she left, though, she accompanied a friend to take an exam for the New York City Police Department. She wound up taking the test herself. She was back in New York’s East Village, working in a drug rehabilitation program when the police offered her a job.

“I was very anti-war, but not totally anti-Establishment,” Sautner said. “I didn’t hate the police. I thought, ‘If you want better police officers, better people should become police officers, or more sensitive people should become police officers.’ ”

Sautner signed up, arriving at the New York Police Academy on a motorcycle, with hair to her waist and decked out in the Indian fringe clothes that then were de rigeur with aspiring young radicals. Her boss assigned her to undercover work, and sent her off to bust the city’s burgeoning crop of heroin traffickers.

In one case, Sautner recalled, she met two dealers in a bar and arranged a buy. She followed them to an apartment for the pickup. But as soon as she got in the building, she knew she had made a mistake. When she turned to leave, one dealer put a knife to her throat and said, “Give me the money.”

Sautner handed over $200. They took the money and ran. Sautner drew her gun and chased them down. It turned out the dealer who had threatened her had stabbed his girlfriend the night before.

Sautner’s next stint was in the sex crimes detail. Her partner was an Old World Italian who would let her drive the car “over his dead body. He thought I was a radical feminist,” she said, laughing. But gradually the two grew close.

Over time, though, Sautner found police work was wearing her down. “The day I decided to leave, we had two cases assigned to us--the rape of a 3-year-old girl and the rape of 96-year-old woman.”

Somewhere, Sautner had seen an advertisement for a law school that would consider “life experience” in lieu of an undergraduate degree. “I was 32 then and sort of in a hurry,” she said.

She took the LSAT.

John FitzRandolph, dean of Whittier College School of Law, still remembers the call he got from the woman with great law school admission test scores but no degree.

“She was very mature. Street wise. She gives off authority and competence and good common sense,” he said. He told her to submit an essay and he would recommend that the admissions committee make her an exception.

“I didn’t find law school hard,” Sautner says. “I’d written hundreds of detective reports. That ‘just-the-facts’ style served me well.”

When she graduated, one of her professors, Harvey Levin, hired her to research for the television show, People’s Court. In 1984, Sautner took a job with the City Attorney’s office. After a year prosecuting criminal cases in Van Nuys, she joined the Housing Enforcement Unit.

In 1985, Sautner and the task force filed criminal charges against Dr. Milton Avol, a Beverly Hills neurosurgeon who owned five of the worst buildings in Los Angeles. When a judge sentenced the slumlord to 30 days in jail and 30 days house-arrest in one of his own rapidly decomposing buildings, the story made headlines nationwide.

Similar convictions and sentences followed, and with the approval of the courts, Sautner’s team added new twists, such as forcing slumlords to make contributions to groups that work with the poor and homeless.

Many lawyers manage to get laws changed, said Levin, who is now legal reporter at KCBS-TV. But Sautner, he said, has achieved the more difficult task of changing people’s conduct.

“Every landlord in town is standing up and paying attention,” he said. “I think she’s breathed life into the most important tenants’ right of all--that is the right to live in a decent, habitable dwelling . . . I think she is one of the best things to come along in public law in a long time.”

While Sautner still supervises five lawyers, two hearing officers and two law clerks, her own legal expertise now is focused on the civil-racketeering case.

The lawsuit, filed by the city, the Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation and a private law firm representing individual tenants, charges that more than 100 owners of slum dwellings, with alleged cooperation of certain loan officers at financial institutions, repeatedly changed title on buildings to boost property values, sometimes using “straw owners” and “shell companies”--and in at least one case, even putting property under the ownership of a black Labrador retriever named Toulouse Black.

“With all the equity drained from the buildings, there’s no money left for repairs,” Sautner asserts.

An army of lawyers has emerged to defend the landlords and lenders.

Sautner--who is in salary range that hot-shot novices at big downtown firms might turn their nose up at--seems unimpressed.

“Those lawyers may have gone to Harvard and clerked for Chief Justices of the Supreme Court--I don’t know . . . One thing the City Attorney’s office teaches you is how to try a case on your feet. A lot of lawyers that have gone to better law schools never tried a case, never picked a jury . . . when they appear before a judge, they quake in their boots.”

Sautner finds herself absorbed in her current case, but she is growing restless with her career. Most of the task force cases, while socially rewarding, aren’t legally challenging, she said: “There’s not much controversy about the law, not a lot of legal arguments you can make.”

Such talk makes others who work with the city’s estimated 450,000 slum dwellers uneasy.

The Task Force “has had real impact on people’s lives” said Jill Halverson, who runs the Downtown Women’s Center. And Sautner, she said, “is really the driving force behind all of that work.”

“It’s a small community down here,” Halverson said. “We do need each other’s support. When one goes, it’s tough on the rest. If she left, I wonder what would happen? How many attorneys do you know who want to take that work on?”

How many scrappy, True Believers are left in the lucrative age of L.A. Law?

Still, Sautner admits she is thinking about a career shift. She has judicial ambitions, she concedes.

Until something comes up, though, she takes her satisfaction where she finds it.

Before touring the two latest slum buildings, Sautner visited a place that had been owned by two consecutive slumlords, each of whom had been prosecuted by the task force and sentenced to spend time in their own rat-infested buildings. Walking through the halls, Sautner pointed out the lights the latest owner has installed. “All these doors are new,” she said.

On one floor, a woman and her daughter-in-law invited her into their tiny studio apartments, facing each other across the hall. There were neatly made bunk beds in one unit, tidy twin beds another.

Not all the problems of poverty have been solved. With two young children hugging her knees, the younger woman held up a jar of tap water, in which tiny, almost microscopic little creatures could be seen swimming about.

But asked how things had changed since the new landlord took control, the older woman said, “Ay, que bueno! No more rats, no more cucarachas!”

On the second-floor, a janitor, with pliers and a screwdriver in his pocket, carefully swept up some spilled Cheet-Os. children rode trikes down halls paved with cheap but clean linoleum.

“It’s not paradise,” Sautner said, as she stepped onto the sidewalk. “But you should have seen it before.”