A Million Stories

Evan M. Lopez

Remember Robert N. Coyle Sr., the slumlord and alleged fraudster who (under more than a dozen business names) bought up a small empire of run-down properties in Kensington and Port Richmond [Isaiah Thompson, "Default Lines," Cover Story, June 9, 2010]? The guy who, at the peak of the housing boom, took out enormous mortgages on gigantic packages of the properties, many of which were just abandoned shells? And who, meanwhile, was allegedly luring tenants with fake rent-to-own agreements? And who suddenly defaulted on his enormous loans, leaving behind a looming, massive, highly localized mini-foreclosure crisis?

He's fine, thank you. At least, he's still free: More than year after the Daily News first detailed some of the allegations against him, Coyle has yet to be charged with a crime. As far as anyone seems to know, he's chilling in New Jersey.

His old houses, though, are still right here. And in many cases, they're just as much a blight on their respective neighborhoods as ever — despite the fact that some of them have brand-new owners.

Take, for example, the house on Argyle Street. An abandoned, drug-ridden shell it was when my friend Jamie Moffett moved, three years ago, into the house next door, and an abandoned, drug-ridden shell it remains today.

Moffett had originally figured he'd just buy the place, but it turned out to be bundled up with dozens and dozens of other houses, mass-mortgaged to area banks for millions of dollars — money Coyle used to buy, and then mortgage, even more properties. After Coyle defaulted on the loan, the house on Argyle became property of Realty Capital Management, which, at least, saw to it that the place was finally sealed.

When Moffett found the seal missing recently, he investigated again and found the house — and about 50 other nearby properties, some or all of which used to belong to Coyle, have been sold to a new owner, one "GCG Investment Inc."

Once again, the house has been bundled up with dozens more and sits vacant and unsealed, its owner a new mysterious company. As in the days when Coyle owned it, Moffett finds himself calling another unknown landlord who, like Coyle, seems uninterested in fixing the place up. Exasperated, Moffett, who would love to see such places fixed up and sold at low cost to actual homeowners, has begun making regular calls to 311 and the Department of Licenses & Inspection. Imagining a conversation with the owners, Moffett says, "If you're going to fix it, fix it, but if you're not, I'm going to make just sitting on it like this painful for you."

Flash Flood?

The normally quiet neighborhoods of Roxborough and Manayunk have been besieged by the biggest, most elusive and oft-exaggerated inner-city bane of 2010: flash mobs!

You might recall that the phrase entered the greater Philadelphia lexicon in June 2009 and then returned early this year when young folks flooded South or Market streets, knocked over pedestrians, broke into fights, vandalized and injured some onlookers. Race seemed to play a role, though no one ever pinned down exactly what it was: The mobs, mostly made up of young black kids, hit primarily white business districts.

Now, huddled masses of teenagers have spilled into the Northwest. According to the Roxborough Review, "unusually large crowds of people" — young people, that is — have been converging in the neighborhoods, late at night. The gatherings start out on the small side — a dozen or so people — and then suddenly explode into the 50s, 60s, sometimes 100s. The so-called flash mobs "appear" to have been organized via Twitter and Facebook, wrote the Review. And they're getting worse: According to patch.com, they're a "growing party trend."

Philadelphia University Dean of Students Mark Govani lent credence to the media claims when he called flash mobs the "most intensely difficult" problem of this type that he's ever dealt with. And the Central Roxborough Civic Association held a meeting about them in early December.

And yet, just as was the case in Center City and along South Street, debate remains heated over what flash mobs actually are and whether the new incidents fit the bill.

"There is no flash-mob problem," says Charlie Kline, community relations officer for the Northwest's 5th District Police. "What happens is, a lot of college kids live here, and they have parties that are sometimes a problem."

Kline does admit that the number of parties has increased, most likely because more youth have been moving into the neighborhoods. Both issues have been recurring topics at community meetings for several years now.

But the key difference, according to Kline, anyway, between Flash Mob I: Center City and Flash Mob Returns: Roxborough and Manayunk is simple. In the latter, "no one's getting beat up, no one's getting hurt."

Manhunt

Last week, excitement — if that's the word for it — over the so-called "Kensington Strangler" reached fever pitch, with the Inquirer and Daily News both running lurid front-page headlines about the supposed perpetrator of as many as five or more choking murders and assaults of women in and around Kensington, while a massive police manhunt went into full operation in the neighborhood.

What got significantly less attention, though, were small bits of information that threw into question the idea that these various crimes are, in fact, linked — or that the Kensington Strangler, such as he's been portrayed, even exists.

Police are clear about one thing: Two recent murders of women who were choked have been linked, by DNA, to the same person — and that person, as far as we know, had not been apprehended as of press time.

But much of what gave the Strangler such vividness in the press was the idea that he may have committed three other recent assaults in which women were choked. And police are much less ready to make that connection. Last week, Lt. Ray Evers told City Paper he thought the media was "going overboard," cautioning that many of these incidents could be unrelated.

"We believe the three [assaults] are closely tied," Evers says. "The two homicides are definitely tied. And the three assaults and homicides may be tied together. But this is [an area with] high-risk activities" — an area, in other words, where crimes like the choking of a prostitute is not, unfortunately, necessarily unheard-of.

The idea of a single Kensington Strangler gets even more complicated. It turns out that police have already made one arrest and detained a person of interest in two cases potentially involving choking — but don't believe either is tied to the two murders definitively attributed to the Strangler. These tidbits might not be very glamorous, but they suggest a subtler story about the regular violence these women face — that's anything but breaking news.