My fiance and I decided to move in together, so we started looking for places. For some reason, one day when he was working late, his mother had apparently “found the perfect place,” text him, he was miffed but busy as hell, so he asked me to meet her just to shut her up. So I drive over, the neighborhood is sketchy and I mean I have no problem going to my friends' places ‘on the wrong side of town and hearing gun-shots but this place was super sketchy’ sketchy. I saw her car pulled up at a tiny little house where three of the tiny houses were so close only the driveway kept the distance. I phone her, miffed myself because I was working early the next day and still had post-doc work to finish. She came out with a sketchy dude, and they ushered me in. The house was dark, so I tried to flip the lights on. No power. I suggested we come back to look at it during daylight, but the landlord said ‘no, no. I have a flashlight here.’ Ol, this is strike about 30, but I was trying to be nice. Not necessarily for the landlord's benefit, but the woman was my fiance's mother. He brings in a small flashlight, and we can only see what he decides to point the light on. MIL said something to the effect of “not bad, huh?” I just stayed quiet. If I said anything, it would have been running screaming.
Finally we finished looking after I told them I had to be up for work in 5 hours (yeah, that kinda dark.) I took the landlord's number, never intending to use it, and left.
I get a call from fiance about 2 hours later asking if the place really was so nice that we had to sign a lease before the end of the night. I asked him what the Hell he was talking about bc I would rather build a mud-hut. Apparently his mother had signed his name to a year lease after I left. In order to get out of it, we would have had to take the landlord AND his mother to court, proving fraudulent signatures and the landlord's awareness of fraudulent signatures. I had a few family members who would have represented us, but at this point fiance would have been screwed on multiple levels. So, considering that he had an illegal lease, we went to the landlord first. The landlord just said he had paperwork that couldn't be disputed. And because it was too dark to take photos when I was there, I had no photographic evidence. The only evidence we had were the “what is happening” texts.
That landlord also let us know how sketchy he was when we were there. He announced the number of guns he had “so don't worry about anyone trying to break in.” And he pointed to his pitt saying the dog would handle anything we didn't like. He had actively trained the dog to be aggressive to people it didn't know. Fiance had a pitt himself, but the “fall asleep thinking he's a lap-dog” pitt.
Long story short, this creepy dude said he'd knock the lease to a six month lease while his dog got used to us. We finally said screw-it. Six months is just six months, not worth the heinous amount of court fees and killing the relationship with his mother (not that it wasn't hit pretty hard anyway.)
In that six months, landlord's dog would regularly growl at me in our tiny yard, making fiance's dog freak out and stand between my legs all buffed out and force landlord's dog to “submit.” They never fought, and if they had tried, I would have stopped it even if I had to be hurt doing such. Fiance's dog always just walked outside with me to try to protect me. The stove stopped working. One of the shower heads stopped working. And the floor began to feel unstable. We even caught the landlord's uncle sneaking out of the crawl space with a jug of water once because his had been cut off.
The six months were finally up, we told him we were out of there, and found a little brownstone we liked. Not even another 6 months later we saw the old landlord on the news having been caught distributing and making crack and LIGHTING HIS GIRLFRIEND ON FIRE.