Swann’s Song

When Kimberly Tracey called the city to complain about her East Dallas apartment complex, she had a list of gripes. Maintenance was poor, the linoleum on her kitchen floor concealed rotted wood, and the roof leaked in several places. The entire building was a mess, she said.

City inspectors eventually made their way to the distinctive red-brick building at 917 North Haskell Avenue in the winter of 1994 and began stapling warning placards to the doors. “This building is in a hazardous condition,” the red placards read. “Occupancy is prohibited.” The tenants would have to move and the owner, Christina Swann, should have already been making arrangements to have the structure demolished.

It sounded simple enough, but the city didn’t know it had cornered a wildcat. Swann–when she wasn’t in jail on unrelated charges–blatantly defied the order. When code-enforcement workers put up the placards, Swann would promptly tear them down.

One day, after inspectors screwed boards into window sills to close off the building, Swann unscrewed them. If the city ran off tenants with talk of demolition and relocation, Swann simply advertised for new renters.

Despite Swann’s repeated attempts to thwart demolition, the city remained determined to tear the property down, says Ramiro Lopez, a code-enforcement supervisor. “She’s actually drawing the line in the sand and saying, ‘Come on,'” Lopez told Channel 8 on Dec. 14, 1994, “but this is the wrong fight.”

City officials would soon learn that Swann wasn’t intimidated by government power and was determined to have her say and her way. Today, almost two years after the city first tangled with Swann, the German-born landlady appears to have gained the upper hand. In the process, she’s become a sort of folk hero to haters of intrusive government throughout the area.

“It was all illegal, what they were doing,” Swann says. “If they think that they have a person who is weak, with no backup, no lawyer or nothing, they’ve made a mistake. If they think in their sick minds that they can do something to you and get away with it, they will do it every time. They have no sensitivity for humanity. They are there to help people and they do the opposite. They destroy.”

Jean Coyle, one of Swann’s staunchest defenders, believes the landlady is a victim of government persecution. “I have looked at her files and it is incredible what has been done to her,” she says.

A tall, gaunt, Nordic blonde whose once-beautiful face now has grooves of discontent slashing across it, Swann still speaks in the clipped cadence of her native German. An artist, she wears flowing clothes spattered with paint. She’s a talker; her long, conjoined sentences often meander. She is, depending on whom you talk to, a worthy opponent of arbitrary city government, or a loon–an impossible pain in a bureaucrat’s butt.

“She is unconventional and eccentric,” says a former neighbor, J.T. Martin. “She seems to have her own kind of logical basis, and she looks at things differently than other people. She certainly doesn’t seem to mind a fight.”

Swann, 53, says she was a model before she emigrated from Europe in the early 1970s. Now she’s a fighter. In January 1995, Swann, representing herself, took the city to federal court, alleging that it deprived her of due process in its efforts to demolish her building, and therefore violated her civil rights.

Legally, she had done her homework. She proved in preliminary hearings that the city failed to notify her of the hearing in which the Dallas Urban Rehabilitation Standards Board (URSB) ordered the building demolished, and pointed out that the list of repairs the city had demanded were problems she had fixed in 1992.

“The defendants have harassed, humiliated, and slandered Swann before tenants, friends, associates, and the business community, all in an attempt to drive Swann from her land and/or to cause her to voluntarily abandon her land,” Swann stated in her petition.

Before the trial, however, the city had been trouncing Swann in the court of public opinion.

Her first introduction to the public came in December 1994 when WFAA-TV Channel 8 reporter Valeri Williams showcased Swann’s eight-unit apartment complex on Haskell, and, with the help of a few tenants and city officials, painted a picture of an uninhabitable apartment complex run by a greedy and uncaring landlady.

“Spread the word” to renters, Dallas Tenants Association president Jeff Veazey trumpeted to Channel 8, which broadcast several segments about Swann. “There is a landlord in East Dallas who will steal their money, steal their property, and who will show no remorse.” Swann is someone “who city housing authorities describe as one of Dallas’ worst slumlords,” Channel 8 anchorman John McCaa said during the same newscast.

Viewers also learned that Swann was in jail for burglarizing a tenant’s apartment and continued to rent apartments to “unsuspecting tenants” even though the city had slated her building for demolition. Veazey concluded that “it gives slumlords a bad name for her to be classified with them.”

Swann says she’s going to sue all of them–Veazey, McCaa, Channel 8–for defaming her. The landlady says she’s been railing against common perceptions of her since that fateful day city officials marched onto her property and boarded up her building.

The city, for its part, calls Swann a slumlord; she, in turn, calls them Nazis. They say she refuses to obey the law; she says they have harassed her unmercifully, issuing arrest warrants against her for petty infractions. They say she is paranoid; she says they’re out to destroy her apartment building so they can carry on a sinister plan to widen Haskell Avenue. “There is no end to their greed and their nastiness,” she says. (City officials do indeed plan to widen Haskell.)

During the last few years, Swann’s life has been consumed with battles against what she sees as wholesale corruption and moral decline in Dallas’ city agencies. For years, she says, she has fought government intrusion in people’s lives. Now, as Swann sees it, she is merely engaging in guerrilla warfare against city government run amuck.

Working from her headquarters, a massive home in East Dallas about a mile from the controversial complex, Swann has papered City Hall with self-scrawled legal documents and has forced city officials to put anything they say to her in writing.

In her lawsuit against the city, federal court proceedings have favored Swann. But she harbors a whole host of grievances against the city, the courts, and the media, and will not rest until they’ve all been made to pay.

“You know, I believe in God,” she says. “I believe in doing right, and if somebody screws me, they better be real careful, because I will screw them back 10 times. It’s like a dog or child–if you don’t catch them right when they do something–slap them once–they’re going to do it again. So my dogs are very obedient.”

No one lives at 917 North Haskell anymore–the place that Swann’s most vocal former tenant, Kimberly Tracey, called the “Haskell House of Horrors.”

The building, located just down the street from Criswell Bible College, sits empty and partially boarded up. Inside, the stairs lean a bit from foundation problems, but the apartments, except for being dusty and old, still possess charm. Outside, a potted plastic plant sits on the edge of the landing window over the front door. Nothing stands out, except the curious message scrawled on the board covering the front door: “I’M SUING THE CITY. The owner. C. Swann. Winning!”

The building had a colorful history even before Swann bought it in 1986. “There have been drug dealers, prostitutes,” says one neighbor, who refused to give his name. “This old place is more trouble than it’s worth. They just need to tear the whole thing down.”

Before she and her husband divorced, Swann lived in Highland Park and owned more than 200 rental units in Dallas. Then the city’s real-estate market crashed. Of developers in Dallas in 1988, Swann says, “I was one of the last holdouts. Everyone else was going belly-up, everything was vacant, and if you had a vacancy, you were up shit creek because people would break in and do crack and take all your plumbing. It was horrible. You just wanted to hit them.”

By 1990, she had lost all of her rental properties except one: the eight-unit apartment building on Haskell. She began rehabbing the structure–which, by then, was vacant–with her handyman, Johnny Briscoe, using the walls, built-in tables, and even door frames as pallets for her unusual abstract art.

When she bought the building, Swann told the mortgage holder she’d save it from becoming an urban blight. “It had hookers in there, trashy people,” she says. “It was right up by Baylor, so my intention was to put nurses and people like that in there. Except the only people who wanted to live there were artists.”

Most of the problems with the building had come not from hookers but from water damage that resulted when Swann had Dallas Water Utilities resume service to the building, not realizing that vandals had stolen some of the copper pipes that ran under it. By the fall of 1993, despite warnings and scrutiny from Dallas’ Urban Rehabilitation Standards Board, Swann had the building ready for renters.

The place rented quickly, bringing in about $2,700 a month. Swann lived comfortably off the proceeds in her well-appointed home on Gaston Avenue.

The tenants and the landlady lived together peacefully at first. Swann sometimes took too long to make repairs, but the apartments were reasonably priced, and had a funky, artistic air.

“There really wasn’t any problem for a couple of months, because I had told her I would be willing to wallpaper and paint and do certain things,” says Tracey, who moved in during August 1993. “We tried to work together, and she OK’d some things, and then got angry and told me to tear everything down after I had made some improvements.”

The women fought over everything. Tracey says Swann would illegally enter apartments and start screaming at tenants; Swann says Tracey and another renter would vandalize the place, then call city inspectors.

Based on Tracey’s account of her struggles, Veazey decided Swann was an unrepentant slumlord. “Swann wasn’t kidding anybody that she was making repairs,” Veazey says today. “She would trot out her two little…flunkies and she would get them up a ladder, and then she’d have them move a brush around and that would be it.”

Meanwhile, code-enforcement inspectors investigated Tracey’s complaints and referred the case to the URSB. The board ordered the building demolished during a meeting Swann attended on Aug. 2, 1994.

At the hearing, city officials stood by the demolition order, even though a code-enforcement supervisor admitted he was acting largely on hearsay. “I have never been on the inside,” Noble Jones stated, according to transcripts from the hearing. “But I understand it is in bad condition, and our recommendation stands: vacate, remove, and demolish.”

Tracey gave rambling testimony about the horrors of her apartment: “You can see with the linoleum–I mean it may look nice on top, but underneath it’s rotted wood. My toilet right now leaks into the ceiling, in the floor which is somebody else’s ceiling, but my floor.”

“Well, your testimony was very credible, Ms. Tracey,” then-board chairman Darwin Gaines told Tracey.

“Excuse me,” Swann interjected. “That was credible?” Gaines assured her it was.

Thus began Christina Swann’s highly publicized campaign to thwart the city’s wrecking ball.

Channel 8’s Valeri Williams called it “a game of one-upmanship” before explaining how the city installed tamper-proof boards to keep Swann from gaining access to her building. Craig Cude, a part-time maintenance man for Swann and a tenant, says he came out of his apartment one day and found city officials and Channel 8 reporters outside his door.

“They basically gave me five minutes to get my stuff out of there, because they were going to board up the place,” he says, “and I said, ‘Well, go on and board me up inside, because I have no place else to go.'”

City officials ordered him out anyway. Channel 8 would explain to viewers that Swann was duping people into renting apartments in the condemned building solely to collect their deposit money, forcing people to live in unsanitary conditions, and terrorizing her renters for the fun of it.

The image of Swann the slumlord was complete. “Can you stop her?” Williams asked Lopez on television.

When Swann’s tenants called City Hall, they discovered the city was indeed planning to demolish the building. Several tenants bailed out soon afterward.

Others stayed, but refused to pay rent until they were assured the city would not demolish the place. At the same time, Swann tried to evict Tracey. Tracey fought Swann in court, but finally moved out in July 1995.

Having had no success getting the URSB to rescind its demolition order, Swann wandered one evening into a meeting of an organization called Citizens for Legal Reform. Meetings of the loosely knit collection of anti-government groups and justice-system reform advocates draw growing numbers of people who feel they’ve been disenfranchised by the government and are seeking ways to reform the legal system.

Swann had found a haven. She stepped up to the mike at her first meeting in 1994 and gave a rambling account of her battles with the city, her arrest for burglary, and her general belief that local government and the courts were filled to the brim with corrupt, power-crazy officials and lazy, incompetent lawyers.

Swann asked some of the attendees to go with her to the next URSB hearing to act as witnesses. Says Jean Coyle, who obliged, “She kept asking them, ‘Where are the code violations that I have committed?’ and they kept saying, ‘They are out there, you have them.’ They were just playing games with her.”

Code-enforcement officials will no longer comment on Swann’s case because it is in litigation, Lopez says.

Swann is now appealing a 1994 burglary conviction that came at the height of her battles with her tenants and the city.

“I was trying to regain access to the apartment and fix the plumbing because the tenant upstairs–he didn’t want me to know that he had packed up and started moving,” she says. Swann climbed a rickety ladder, and with Briscoe looking on, pried open the window to Robert Perritt’s second-story apartment.

Perritt called police and said he had found Swann rifling through his boxes. Swann denies that charge, but insists she had every right to take possession of Perritt’s belongings since he had been late paying his rent. She says her lease–and state law–give her permission to execute “landlord’s liens” on tenants’ property if they have not paid.

The Dallas police officer who arrested her never listened to her side of the story, she says.

By the time the police officer left, Perritt says, Swann was “calling me evil and saying, ‘I knew you would turn on me.’ She swears that I had something to do with the city seizing the property.”

Even though he testified against her at her burglary trial, Perritt does not agree with all the charges publicly thrown against Swann. “Our apartment, we loved it,” Perritt says. “It had a lot of character. We had to do some things ourselves, but we never complained. She would be slow, but she’d get it fixed.”

One day, Perritt says, the plumbing went out and Swann asked Perritt for help. “She asked me to come and get her and on the way stop by to get some white bread,” Perritt recalls. The bread slices, she explained, would suck up any electrical currents running along the damp pipes. Swann crawled under the building to fix the plumbing herself and, despite her slices of white bread, got a jolt of electricity through her body. “She came out looking pretty stunned,” Perritt says.

The former tenant says Swann was a hardworking landlady who had little patience for renters who paid late. “People who never paid their rent, they had lots of fights with her, but we never had a problem until she broke in,” Perritt says.

The burglary case was forwarded to a grand jury, where all the parties were told to raise their right hands and swear to tell the truth. “Christina wouldn’t,” Perritt recalls. “She said she didn’t believe in the grand-jury system.”

The jury indicted her anyway. “The D.A. told the grand jury I was a criminal right in front of me,” Swann recalls angrily.

State District Court Judge Mark Tolle would later find Swann guilty of felony burglary and sentence her to 10 years’ probation. She is appealing the case on the grounds that Judge Tolle ignored her evidence and is corrupt. After filing the appeal, a bitter and distrustful Swann stood before Tolle, rejecting his offer to appoint an attorney to represent her.

“Well, I have appointed Mr. [Mark] Stoltz to represent you,” Tolle said, according to court transcripts.

“Well, he is representing you, not me,” Swann shot back.
“Well, he is representing you, ma’am. Are you going to cooperate or not?”
“I have never seen him represent me yet. He is representing you. Let’s not make a mistake of confusing that.”

“Ms. Swann, I have been very patient with you,” the judge said.
“Well, I am very patient,” Swann replied, “because I am innocent and I have been put in jail, I lost my dog, and I am about to lose my house, so you can see what patience is. I get my patience from God.”

The burglary conviction wouldn’t be Swann’s last encounter with government and the law. The day after she filed her civil suit against the city–on April 4, 1995–Swann was served with a ticket for a garage sale sign she had put up in her yard. The violation: illegal sign on parkway. The cost: $260.

Four days later, Swann received another ticket, this time for “illegal land use” for having the garage sale in the first place. She also got a ticket for a “dog at large,” even though the ticket specified a female Chow, which she does not have. In May, a warrant was issued for Swann’s arrest because she didn’t pay the $260 sign violation fine.

Swann believes cops don’t like her because of an incident that happened 14 years ago when she was living the good life in Highland Park. She claims an officer was berating her for letting her dog run loose when the two began arguing. Swann, who has never suffered fools in government gladly, decided to drive away. According to the police report, the officer ordered Swann to stop, at the same time reaching inside her car. Swann ended up dragging the policeman with her car.

Highland Park police charged her with assault of a peace officer. Swann denies trying to hurt the officer, insisting she had leaned away from the steering column to escape him and that the car “was running by itself. I didn’t put my foot on the gas to hurt the man or something like that, but he pushed himself all over me, and I have fibrocystic disease, and people putting their elbows in my breasts is not really the way to go. It was like rape, honey. I flipped out completely.”

Swann was tried for the offense and, reluctantly following advice from her attorney, pleaded guilty.

Today, Swann believes the city is out to destroy her because of her efforts to keep them in line legally. “I can show you pictures from all sorts of places around my building that look totally despicable and they’re run-down and everything else, and nobody ever gives them a ticket of any sort,” she says.

Swann’s former neighbor, J.T. Martin, believes Swann is being persecuted by city government. A doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington, Martin recalls Swann as a vibrant, entertaining hostess when she lived in Highland Park. “She was delightful. She had a funny, crazy wit, a wonderful flair.” He was surprised to see her mug shot on television last year. “I thought she had made someone really, really mad that they would smear her that way.”

When he contacted Swann to see if he could help in any way, she politely declined. “If I ask what is wrong, she says, ‘It’s nothing–it’s nothing but corruption at City Hall.'”

Swann represented herself in her civil suit against the city, and although disorganized and sometimes rambling, poked holes in the city’s contentions about her and her building.

“If [the building] was uninhabitable, why didn’t you take pictures of the [violations in the] apartments?” she asked inspector Vitale Rivera.

“I couldn’t take a picture of a missing smoke alarm because it was not there. I couldn’t take a picture of a gas odor,” he replied.

“But you could have taken a picture of the gas valves missing, couldn’t you?” she queried.

“Probably so.”
“And I had a gas-pressure test and it cost me $450,” Swann added.
U.S. Magistrate Jane Boyle reminded Swann to ask questions, not make statements.

“I just think it is an outright lie, this gas cutoff,” Swann concluded.
Swann would score a major victory this past fall during preliminary hearings. Boyle found Rivera’s testimony “simply not believable. In short, Rivera either has an extremely poor memory or conducted a wholly inadequate inspection of plaintiff’s building,” Boyle said, according to court transcripts. After appointing an attorney for Swann and hearing additional evidence from the city, Boyle ruled on Sept. 29 that the city had not afforded Swann due process and was unable to prove that the building required demolition.

The magistrate also found Tracey, the former tenant, not credible. Boyle stated that the city’s key witness appeared to have a vendetta against Swann, according to court records.

Furthermore, Boyle wrote in her recommendation that “the defendant City of Dallas shall not proceed in any way against the property…and shall refrain from harassing or retaliating against Christina Swann and from selectively enforcing ordinances against her.”

Dallas city attorney Sam Lindsay says the ruling does not “sound the death knell for the City of Dallas,” and that the city expects to prevail in the full-fledged trial tentatively scheduled for February.

The city, clearly at a disadvantage after the ruling, offered to settle with Swann. Swann declined. “Not for what they did,” she says. “They want to terrorize me. They went into my job without a search warrant and stole everything I had. They blocked my whole street up, just like Nazis. They filled the street up with my stuff–they stole it all.”

After a failed attempt at mediation, Boyle ruled that Swann could reopen the apartment building while waiting for the trial. After bringing it up to code, Swann would be able to advertise for new renters.

Today, Swann spends her days supervising workers on the apartment building, organizing her legal papers, and building cases against her enemies. She religiously attends the meetings of her anti-government group whose members see her as a hero.

Swann, never one to give quarter, says she’ll make good use of the courts and find her redemption. Most of her defendants will be employed by some government agency, she says, and she has a message for them, imparted with considerable bile: “You people put me out of house and home,” she says, “and now I am going to do the same thing to you.”

She is never far from City Hall or the courthouse, where she files her papers and demands public records. While confronting the bureaucrats who she says have driven her to rebellion, she doesn’t take no for an answer.

“When I go in there,” she says, “I am so bitchy. I tell them exactly what the law is. In a country like this, it is so terrible to think that all this is necessary.