‘Hey, we own half your house’ –– Bed-Stuy family terrorized by deed theft
In June of 2017, Ayisha Doyle’s phone rang. A man on the other end of the line was calling to inform her that he was a representative of the ARLO 67 LLC company.
“Hey, we own half your house. Just thought I’d let you know,” the man said.
“Excuse you? What are you talking about?” Doyle said she responded. He said, “Oh, yeah, we purchased your uncle’s interest in the house, so we own half the house.”
Doyle immediately asked for some proof of this, since she hadn’t seen her uncle in person or heard from him since March of 2007 when he came to Brooklyn for his mother’s funeral –– he’d been living in Australia for the last 40-plus years.
Her uncle, Walter Giles, had inherited part of the house along with his sister, Phillipa –– Ayisha Doyle’s mother — but Giles had no active role in paying bills or the building’s upkeep, and rarely returned to Brooklyn or contacted family members.
“So, I was shocked when this guy told me that because I was like, first of all, how’d you find him at the bottom of the world? That’s what immediately made me think, oh, this can’t be real. The guy said, ‘Well, we’ll send something in the mail, and I’ll call you back.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no. Who you can speak to next is my lawyer, because you and I will not be conversing.’ And then the next thing I got in the mail was a default judgment from the foreclosure court granting them a partition. That’s when I was like, something’s really wrong.”
Doyle has been fighting to save her family home from deed theft ever since.
Brooklyn’s ‘Little Harlem’
Doyle’s family has lived in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for nearly a century. In the 1940s, her great-grandparents Mabel and Walter Clement Moore purchased the property at 234 Jefferson Avenue. It’s a three-story single-family Victorian brownstone, originally built in the 1880s. They had to think carefully about how to acquire the stately house. Although they had saved up the funds to buy a home, Bed-Stuy was a predominantly white neighborhood at that time and locals were determined to keep it that way. Many had joined a white supremacist group called the Midtown Civic League to try to stem the growing influx of Black people renting and buying the district homes.
Bed-Stuy was quickly becoming a preferred neighborhood for African Americans because of its site as a nexus for public transportation. The area was nicknamed Brooklyn’s “Little Harlem.” At the time, the Amsterdam News wrote reports about efforts by the Midtown Civic League to keep Blacks out of Bed-Stuy. The Midtown Civic League was the “Ku Klux Klan in the north,” the Rev. Theophilus Joseph Alcantara of the St. Simon African Orthodox Church told the paper.
“The Rev. Alcantara further related that the purpose of the white organization is to co-operate with the banks and merchants in order to prevent Negroes from holding any real property in the Bedford Stuyvesant section,” the paper stated in its September 17, 1938 edition: “‘These bankers,’ he charged, ‘are out to press off the few Negro property owners by insisting on early payment of the interest on the mortgage held by them.’”
The Doyle family survived the race-based turmoil of the time: They were one of the first of three Black families to move to the block. Overt housing discrimination was so strong that they used a proxy –– a white person to stand in as their substitute –– to purchase their home. Even with the paperwork for the property signed, though, they couldn’t get a bank mortgage on the house: Banks would not give Black people mortgages.
Doyle’s grandparents, James and Phyllis Giles, took possession of the house. James died in 1995, then Phyllis passed on March 4, 2007, and the house was left to their children: Walter and Phillipa.
Tending to the building for future generations
Walter had not been interested in the property even before his parents passed. He’d moved to Australia and only rarely surfaced to contact his family. Ayisha said that by 2016, she and her mother, Phillipa, had been able to pay off a mortgage the family had taken out on the building when they needed extra funds. They paid all the bills, tended to the building’s maintenance, and looked after it for future generations of their family.
Giles had reportedly sold 75% of his stake in the house to Theodore Zucker, a property investor and owner of Zucker Asset Management and ARLO 67 LLC, for $300,000. Since Phyllis’s will was never probated or legally transferred over to her heirs after she died in 2007, it was not clear whether the Doyles could keep the house. Zucker was claiming that he paid for his share of the house and was entitled to a portion of it; he allegedly had a deed signed by Giles and notarized in Australia.
To this day, Ayisha Doyle can’t believe that Zucker was able to locate her uncle and purchase shares of the property. She said that she has asked him to provide some kind of payment receipt proving that Walter Giles sold his share, but Zucker has failed to do so.
Zucker’s ARLO 67 LLC has made several attempts to force a partition sale of the Bed-Stuy home and at some point, Doyle even sat down to a mediated settlement conference with Zucker, but no agreement between the two parties could be found. This past June 6, the property was reportedly auctioned off for $1.7 million, with Zucker’s LLC named as the buyer, although the sale has not yet been finalized.
Representative from developer who allegedly purchased Jefferson Avenue brownstone at auction.
“The biggest issue is them being LLCs — they can file anything and then they just bury you in a mountain of paper, and it’s your job, then, as a homeowner if you want to get your house back, to prove that it’s yours –– or that they’re lying, or that they have committed fraud,” Doyle told the Amsterdam News. “It’s just on you.”
Doyle’s attorney, Kanika Sloan Williams, is originally from Brooklyn and now lives down south, but has been helping her former neighbor fight to keep the Jefferson Avenue home for the last seven years. The case has been before five judges — one of whom was in the second circuit appeals appellate court. “The challenge is that you’re facing an investment company,” said Sloan Williams. “At one point, they had sued Aisha and her mom for $300,000 for ‘use and occupancy’ of a home that’s been in their family since the 1940s. Basically, they were saying that Aisha and her mom owed them money because they stayed there. They just come up with lawsuit after lawsuit … The vast majority of homeowners who’ve had their homes forever — they just don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to pay an attorney to fight back.”
Sloan Williams believes the case against the Doyles is fraudulent, but said she understands how frustrating it is for other homeowners who are having to deal with speculators. Unfortunately, it’s not illegal for a real estate investor to buy an interest in a home, and once they own an interest, it’s not illegal for them to ask the courts to force a sale.
“I will tell you, because I do estate law, I tell people all the time … if you’re leaving your house to more than one person, one person is going to want to sell, one person’s going to want to keep it every time, every single time,” she said. “It’s very rare that heirs agree unless the property is in such disrepair that nobody wants to repair it.”
Sloan Williams offered suggestions for protecting a home from deed theft: “It’s absolutely safer for the person who owns the property to determine what they want to have happen,” she said. “[You can] leave it in a trust and the trust basically directs if you want it to be sold and you split any proceeds. Or say you have rental income or something to that effect: That rental income gets split amongst the heirs. Then there’s less of an incentive for heirs to sell anything because the trust instrument is what governs how that property functions. But if you just leave something outright and let’s say you have three kids, they’ll fight over it … It’s a lot safer to, if you want to keep your house in the family, particularly in Black and Brown communities, to leave that house in a trust and have that trust instrument determine that perhaps the heirs get the income from the property, and the property itself does not get sold.”
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