A letter from FL Gov Jeb Bush, re: The Last 72 Hours prior to Election Day 2002

Re your post #54, dorben: I just sent you a freepmail about this, but I am not embarassed to say this publicly either -- I understand now why you publicly posted post #54 to me. I see you are on the "Sawgrass Rebellion" thread, and obviously, I am on some sort of "hit list" being distributed by those people, since you are not the first one to accuse me of being unpatriotic simply because I don't support them. (Fearless FLyers also asked to be taken off my list for the same reason.)

I am not unpatriotic. FYI, as AAABEST knows because I posted it to him, I almost lost my life in my own battle to protect my own private property rights, and others did lose their lives, and have gotten murdered in that same on-going battle. I even went to the trouble of posting news published about such murders.

AAABEST, who I think talks a big talk but just likes to be on tv and have barbeques about property rights, ttold me publicly people getting murdered rate as nothing with him. I guess what is most important is to have a barbeque and get on tv. That's fine.

But don't say, in your ingnorance, that I am unpatriotic or that I do not care about private property rights. I do.

BTW, for all the press they got, I notice that there was only 200 people total in their biug rally crowd -- which was comprised of 50% of people from out of town, meaning they did not suceed in reaching this community. "100" people is fewer than the number of kids attending any one grade level in any public school in Collier County. In short, more 4th graders live in their neighborhood than showed up at their rally. Whatever. Hope everyone had a fun time.

Anyway, good for them, and sorry they don't think people losing their lives for that same cause is worth anything. I respectfully disagree.

BTW, dorben, here is the article I posted to AAABEST, lest you think I am inventing a tale here. I guess private property rights people prefer that you live out in the hinderlands and nowhere else, otherwise, you do not have any right to complain about theft of property like a lease. Julie, this is all just FYI.

The UK Guardian -- New York Dispatch

Paying the rent with your life

In New York, the relationship between landlord and tenant is rendered tense - and even murderous - by the practice of rent control, says Oliver Burkeman

Oliver Burkeman
Thursday May 2, 2002
The Guardian

A more sensitive and thoughtful landlord than Louis Hubrecht, faced with a tenant he wanted to get rid of, might have tried a bit of gentle persuasion - or simply raised the rent until staying was no longer an option.

But not even Mr Hubrecht's own attorney ever made much effort to convince the jury at his murder trial that his client was a sensitive man. The dishevelled, white-haired 67-year-old had "great difficulty showing or expressing any emotion", he told them. And inflating the rent, as it happened, was impossible.

True, the one-bedroom studio apartment that Mr Hubrecht leased to Barbara Kenna, a school librarian, was part of a brownstone in one of the Upper East Side's swankier Madison Avenue blocks, worth several thousand dollars a month. But it was rent-controlled - governed by an archaic system almost unique to New York, which meant she had been paying just a few hundred since she first moved there in 1966.

And so, in September 2000, Mr Hubrecht took the action that saw him sentenced this week to between 20 years and life in jail. One morning, as Ms Kenna, who was 69, dragged her luggage cart down the stairs, he opened the door of his second-floor apartment and shot her six times with a 38-calibre revolver.

In a chilling detail that was frequently referred to as the case dragged on, he then stepped over her body to put some bags of rubbish out on the pavement. It was more than an hour later that he turned himself in to police.

"Nothing can ever excuse what happened on that day," said Justice Harold Beeler, of Manhattan's supreme court. "Yes, I'm very sorry for what happened that morning," Mr Hubrecht mumbled.

Someone like Louis Hubrecht - an overwhelmingly strange man who refused to speak to his tenants, communicating by written notes, and whom Ms Kenna had long accused of pilfering things from her apartment - might have ended up with a murder conviction wherever he had lived.

Nowhere but New York, though, would you have found the odd circumstances that seem to have led to this grisly crime: in no other city is the relationship between tenant and landlord rendered so tense - and even murderous - by the curious phenomenon of rent control.

Originally introduced as an emergency measure during the second world war, rent control now protects around 45,000 tenants who began their leases before 1971, preventing landlords from making all but the most nominal increases in monthly payments, even as the Manhattan rental market soars. And while many hail it as a vital safeguard for affordable housing in an increasingly unaffordable city, it has thrown up some bizarre anomalies.

It was rent control, famously, that allowed Mia Farrow to live for years in a 11-room mansion overlooking Central Park - as featured in the film Hannah and Her Sisters - for about $2,300 (£1,570). And it is rent control that still allows Alistair Cooke to rent his eight-room apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue for a similar figure.

It's not clear what Mr Hubrecht's plans were once he had got rid of Ms Kenna - he had let all but two of the apartments in the building stand empty for some time - but what was clear was that he wanted his rent-controlled tenants out. He had offered the other occupant of the building, Louise Duncan, $350,000 to move.

Perhaps it was simply a matter of time until something like this happened. In 1998, Mark Glass, a landlord with offices in downtown Manhattan, took out a contract on the life of his tenant, Brigitte Marx, who wouldn't leave her rent-controlled apartment in a renovated tenement. When that appeared to fail, he hatched a plot to kill her by means of a heroin overdose. And then she disappeared.

Some time later, officers from the New York police department called at Glass's office: could he help them in connection with the death of Brigitte Marx?

The landlord wasn't to know that she was actually under police protection in an uptown hotel, as part of a sting to capture him. He was sentenced to between seven and 14 years in prison.

Louis Hubrecht, as the prosecutor at his trial pointed out to Barbara Kenna's family, will almost certainly die in prison.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002

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