a piece by Ron Stodghill in yesterday's New York Times:
"The mold dispute is the latest salvo in what, according to New York housing officials, is one of the nastiest residential wrangles in recent memory. In 1996 Mr. Couri moved into the apartment on East 73rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, a serene, tree-canopied block in one of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighborhoods. Since then, he and Mr. Pavia have been embroiled in a feud worthy of the Hatfields and the McCoys — a standoff that has involved dozens of housing inspectors, police officers, private investigators, psychiatrists and public agencies, not to mention whopping legal fees.
The brawl is also emblematic of another business reality: when it comes to real estate battles, New York’s biggest developers — the Rudins, Speyers and Tishmans of the world — may make the most lucrative deals, but their disputes often pale next to those between the owners of the city’s 3.3 million residential buildings and their tenants, New York real estate experts say." {...}
'If Mr. Pavia and Mr. Couri agree on anything, it is that the stakes in this case are much higher than 750 square feet of living space. Mr. Pavia says his crusade is not against an ordinary tenant, but rather a practiced schemer who has cleverly blended intimidation with an ability to exploit weaknesses in the court system and housing and building departments to extort money from him and avoid paying his rent.
“The New York housing system is terribly skewed when you can’t get rid of a tenant like Couri,” said Mr. Pavia, a small, balding man whose quick smile offsets melancholy eyes. “The man has absolutely no regard for the truth. But like any good con man there is usually a nugget of truth on which he builds.”
Mr. Couri dismisses his landlord’s contentions. “If I was trying to get money from Pavia, I’d be better off trying to open up a rancid clam,” he says. Mr. Couri maintains that Mr. Pavia’s desire to evict him is motivated simply by greed. By ousting Mr. Couri, the only tenant in the building who has a rent-stabilized lease, Mr. Pavia intends to capture a much higher market value for the building when he sells it, Mr. Couri says.
“I’ll never back down from what I believe is wrong,” Mr. Couri said. “I believe that Pavia has abused the system to avoid rent stabilization and steal my apartment.
“Home is your sanctuary, your castle,” he added. “Why should I move?”'
It's always about the principle. Someone should do a personality survey to see if there's a way to identify these high-conflict personalities. Some of it is certainly cultural, but as is clear from Mr. Couri's track record, this is a lifelong compulsion. Isn't there a way to prevent people like this from using the courts to their advantage to punish others and make them miserable?