Last month, the City of St. Louis filed suit against a woman who’d been running a series of illegal rooming houses — with 39 houses in the city limits alone. Dara Daugherty and her associates operated in plain sight for years, racking up countless code violations as their properties played host to stabbings, overdoses and even deaths.
While Daugherty may be the most egregious, she is not alone in violating the city’s building codes for years on end. And the suit against her may be the beginning of the end for a number of problematic landlords’ illicit operations — not just hers.
“There are a handful of landlords in the city of St. Louis who know how to make money off this process, make so much money that they don't care what happens as far as enforcement goes,” says John McLaughlin, a former police officer who is now a program manager with the Nuisance and Problem Properties Unit of the city’s Building Division
Among the things these landlords don’t seem to care too much about is having warrants out for their arrest. For some, the heat is just the cost of doing business.
Daugherty at one point had 32 warrants out for her arrest. Cuong Q. Tran, another landlord with a large number of holdings in south St. Louis, currently has a dozen warrants out for his.
“He does nearly the same thing as the Daugherty’s, other than the fact that he doesn’t rent out boarding houses,” says McLaughlin. “He has a lot of properties. And he pushes the system for the money.”
Ed Ware, who has been with the Building Division for more than 40 years, says that Tran is just one tier above Daugherty. (Which, given the conditions in Daugherty’s properties, isn’t saying much.)
Tran owns at least seven buildings that, combined, contain around 200 apartments in south city with a roster of complaints to match. A three-story, 12-unit apartment building on Neosho Street in Bevo Mill has racked up 26 complaints with the Citizens Service Bureau since 2020. A few blocks away, just on the other side of Morgan Ford, a 33-unit apartment building owned by Tran has seen 23 such complaints since 2020. A 64-unit apartment complex near the intersection of Chippewa and Meramec streets has accrued 18 complaints in the same time frame. Those complaints range from rat infestations to the presence of raw garbage to the presence of bed bugs.
Not all CSB complaints lead to building code violations, but a source familiar with Tran's operation says his holdings have generated multiple violations in the past years, many of which have been referred to municipal court. His apartment building at 4604 Morgan Ford alone has generated more than 10 cases currently in the municipal court system.
Broadly speaking, when there is a code violation at a property, the Building Division will send a letter to the property owner giving them a certain amount of time to fix the issue. If that doesn't bring a property into compliance, the case is referred to the City Counselor's office, which files a case against the property owner in municipal court. The property owner gets a summons.
Chris Basler is an attorney who represents Tran and could not talk about those specific cases against him, though Basler did explain to the RFT how the city's municipal court system generally handles building code violations.
Basler says that usually by the first court date, whatever is at issue with the property has not been fixed. "It takes a while sometimes with some of the worst properties and you have to get a second court date," he says, adding that typically property owners are allowed a second and third court date, too, to give them more time to remedy the situation.
"It's pretty workable as long as you're still making progress on getting it fixed," says Basler. "And then once you're done, they will generally issue a fine of some sort and you pay it off."
Assuming, that is, the property owner shows up to their court date. If that doesn't happen, the municipal court issues a warrant for their arrest.
But then things can get tricky.
According to the lawsuit filed against her by the city, Daugherty once told a police officer that it was worth spending the occasional night in jail because she was making $40,000 a month from her scheme.
“I'm going to tell you the truth,” McLaughlin says. “It’s just like Dara Daugherty said, ‘I'm just making too much money. I don't care if I sit in jail for a couple of days or a day. I make too much money doing this.’”
McLaughlin knows first hand that Daugherty has been arrested due to her municipal warrants. One day he was there when she came to City Hall to apply for an occupancy permit.
“Across from my office I look out the door and I see Dara Daugherty and I know that she's got a bunch of warrants,” he recalls. “So after she applied for the occupancy permit and went back to her property, I called the third district and had her picked up.”
In general, McLaughlin says, someone picked up on this sort of municipal court warrant just does a quick night or two in jail and typically has no problem getting a new court date. “It’s pretty easy to clear those warrants,” he says.
McLaughlin says he doesn’t know if Tran has ever been picked up in a similar fashion. And it’s hard to say how much someone like Tran really feels the heat, despite all the warrants. Basler says that municipal warrants typically don’t see much action on the part of police, particularly in the wake of municipal court reforms that came in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson protests.
And a source familiar with the interplay being the Building Division and Courts said that the warrants issued by courts are "soft warrants," meaning they lack information like the target’s address or date or birth. So, in Tran's case, even if he were pulled over, the officer wouldn't even know about the dozen warrants issued by municipal court.
But while some bad landlords have been all too happy to treat warrants as the cost of doing business, both Ware and McLaughlin say the city’s 57-page lawsuit filed against Daugherty and her associates is going to change things.
Ware says he’s never seen this sort of suit in his long career, that hundreds of work hours went into it and that he expects it will have ripple effects.
Ware and McLaughlin point to Brentwood raiding Daugherty’s property there, as well as the city’s recent action taken against a north city slumlord as evidence of that ripple.
“It’s definitely going to send a message that this sort of thing won’t be tolerated,” says Ware. “The city of St. Louis is trailblazing this type of enforcement.”
Given that the lawsuit against Daugherty breaks new ground in the city, it’s unclear exactly where it will lead but when asked what the big picture outcomes of the suit could be, McLaughlin tells the RFT, “When we start talking about taking their properties away from them, when we start talking about seizing assets, when we start talking about looking into taxes and all these types of things, that grabs attention. This is going to be the first of its kind for us. I have not seen us, the city of St. Louis, take an action like this.”
McLaughlin adds, “This is not an easy thing to pull off.”
For an up-close look inside some of the apartment buildings owned by Tran, click on RFT photographer Zachary Linhares' gallery below.
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