Bad Buzz: King Bee building residents have turned on downtown St. Louis developers Sam Glasser and Dave Jump

In 2003 Glasser and Jump had the building divided into 33 condominiums. As realtors brought in prospective buyers, Glasser would sometimes get involved in negotiations. His construction crew could help customize the interiors, one of the King Bee's main selling points.

A couple in their thirties, Scott and Amanda Pozzo, had many ideas for the top-floor loft with a view of the Arch, and Glasser fueled their enthusiasm. "He's a dynamic personality," says Amanda Pozzo. "He gets you going."

Jill Holtrop agrees. "Sam can be very charming, very charming — and generous," she says. "He'll do this for you. He'll do that for you. Nothing is ever a problem."

But that all changed, Holtrop says, when she and her husband began to find fault with the building. "Sam and Jim and I got along very well for years — until we asked Sam to make good on his promises."

With residents calling city inspectors, while at the same time questioning Glasser's management, the King Bee became engulfed in Washington Avenue's own War of the Roses.

One of the first fights erupted over air conditioners. In May 2006 city inspector Walter Murphy responded to a call from Michael McVeigh, a fourth-floor resident who complained about noise and heat coming through the wall of his loft. Opening a door that led to the old staircase, Murphy saw the cooling units weren't ventilating.

The code was being violated on two fronts, Murphy says. First, the staircase wasn't being used as it was intended — as a way to exit the building. Second, it was packed with clutter that could fuel a rapidly spreading fire. "That condition, we felt, was really detrimental to the safety of the building," he says. "It was used for something it shouldn't have been used for."

So Murphy and other inspectors met with Glasser in what he calls, dryly, "The Great Sidewalk Meeting." Glasser agreed to move the air conditioners to the parking lot. Murphy took him at his word and moved on.

When Murphy didn't issue a formal violation letter, some residents suspected he was cozy with Glasser. A lanky, tanned man who grows irritated at the mention of the King Bee, Murphy says he was more concerned with getting results than creating a paper trail. "Knowing Sam, if you send him a violation letter, he's just going to set his lawyers on it," he says.

Later that same month, Jim Holtrop sent a three-page e-mail to Oswald, the building commissioner. Holtrop, an engineer who runs a consulting firm from his loft, criticized everything from the furnace ventilation to cracked paint. Meanwhile, Jill Holtrop was contacting the fire marshal's office, which dispatched a city inspector on August 8, 2006. He found 40 violations.

Glasser didn't take kindly to the meddling couple. In a letter to Murphy on August 25, which intended to bring the inspector up to date on progress at the King Bee, he wrote: "But I can't help enclose [sic] some articles from local newspapers regarding Jim Holtrop and his wife Jill Meyerhardt (residents of 1709 Washington Avenue who have probably created as much grief for you and [sic] they have for us.)"

The Post-Dispatch had written in 2004 and 2005 about a scheme in which the Holtrops participated to defraud a state tax-credit program. Cooperating with investigators, they pleaded guilty to felony stealing on February 19, 2004, and agreed to repay $300,000.

Glasser concluded in his letter: "I only hope these two will one day meet the fate which they richly deserve."

On the evening of May 25, 2004, Jim Holtrop heard fire trucks pull up outside the King Bee. He went down to the lobby and found paramedics carrying one rotund man after another out on a stretcher. Nine people had piled into the elevator that, according to a fire department incident report, fell from the first floor to the basement. Most of the passengers were hip-hop artists, bound for Jupiter Studios on the seventh floor.

Scott and Amanda Pozzo had moved onto the ninth floor just a few weeks before the crash. It was an inconvenience, but the Pozzos say they didn't give it much thought because soon everyone received a reassuring memo from "management." The unsigned June 17 memo read: "The cost of the elevator work — which is nearly $200,000 — is being paid for by the King Bee Building LLC. None of you will be charged a penny for this work..."

Repairs would take a year, the memo continued, and in the meantime operators would be on hand to run the remaining manual elevator. In the end, it took sixteen months to fix the elevator. All that time, the condo association paid the attendants' wages, which amounted to more than $68,000. When the bills came to light in 2006, they touched off a power struggle that continues to this day.

Clerks at Jump's company, American Milling, had handled the condo association's finances until 2006. Pozzo and Michael McVeigh, another member of the King Bee Nine, discovered the questionable elevator bills after they took over the bookkeeping. "I was very surprised," Pozzo says. "Everyone in the association was under the impression the temporary staffing of the elevator was being paid for by King Bee Building LLC."