Portland Slumlord Dies of Old Age

After a lifetime of ‘roaches, rats, rubbish and lawsuits, Joe Soley died rich, surrounded by his loving family.

In this photo from 1996, Old Port land baron Joe Soley is stuffing his personal trash into a city trashcan on the corner of Exchange and Fore Street. Image from one of my many Casco Bay Weekly stories about the dude. The photographer — a resident of a Soley building — didn’t want a byline for this candid shot. Read that particular story, about fighting his sewer bill, here.

Multi-millionaire Joe Soley personally harassed tenants, his own employees and city workers on a regular basis from the mid-1980s onward. He rented literal shit-hole apartments to young hipsters and cockroach-infested dining rooms to desperate restaurateurs, then wouldn’t fix plumbing, heating and electrical issues. He ignored zoning codes, occupancy permits and other laws. He drove building and kitchen inspectors nuts with his refusal to follow the rules, even concerning basics like garbage removal and proper sanitary techniques. All which resulted in his multiple restaurants having filthy kitchens, rats living in his multiple bars and alleys near his Old Port businesses being transformed into ersatz dumpsters. Thanks to Soley’s scofflawing, in the mid-1990s, cobblestoned backstreets became urban dunghills, busy with rodentia and seagulls dueling for dibs on torn bags filled with rotting morsels, food scraps and dirty napkins. And Soley’s resistance to paying janitors and trash removal companies made his funky apartment buildings fire hazards (in many cases, without emergency egress) that stunk of rot, mold and other nastiness.

Like many white rich dudes who made their fortunes in a sketchy manner, Soley was simultaneously a cheapskate and a spendthrift. To some, he acted like a kindly older fella, in rumpled work clothes and coat, with a twinkle in his eye and wide grin on his face. A collector of art and other finery, he was a generous benefactor to theater companies and modern dance troupes.

Many times he paid top dollar for an architecturally ornate but crumbling property, then nickel-dimed the joint and ignored repairs that endangered the lives of others. Soley also screwed over countless tenants with innumerable broken promises. On many occasions during the 1990s and 2000s, tenants would come home to find their building posted as uninhabitable by the city and forced to find emergency accommodations. And Soley usually refused to refund security deposits to departing renters, knowing it would be practically impossible for them to get the money back as you can read in this lawsuit.

A fan of wasting other people’s time and cash, Soley’s legal strategy was one of denial, lying and ignoring court orders. For many years, he didn’t pick up his mail, certified or otherwise. Soley was also partial to yelling at folks over the phone. And when he did respond, in writing, he preferred TO WRITE IN ALL CAPS.

His stinginess on maintenance and improvements meant that many of his Old Port rentals were dangerous and oft-visited by inspectors who fruitlessly tried to get him clean up his act. When apartments were condemned, city officials would be forced to evict tenants for their own safety. And then Soley would do (or promise to-do) the bare minimum to get paying tenants back into his buildings. In 1999, at the height of his dominance of the Old Port real estate scene, a judge and jury ordered him to pay a MILLION dollar civil penalty (more on this in a bit) to four young women who made the mistake of renting an apartment from the slumlord.

Yet when Soley died at age 93 last week, these was very little mention of the many controversial actions that plagued most of the folks who had dealings with him during his 50 plus years in the real estate biz. Instead, the media sane-washed his history, referring to him as a “prominent landlord and developer.” Heck, the Portland Press Herald even let the paid family death notice describe him as “a highly respected builder [and] a visionary of Portland’s Old Port Renaissance, Joe Soley bought many of the buildings in Portland’s historic district and filled them with restaurants, art galleries, and dynamic personalities.”

Talk about historical revisionism.

One thing is for sure: Soley was a character. As a young reporter in Portland during the mid-1990s, I appreciated Soley for providing tons of easy copy. So much content that, while working as a staff writer at the legendary Casco Bay Weekly, I started the “Soley-Watch” column, which ran on a pretty regular basis, thanks to constant tips from dissatisfied tenants and disgruntled employees.

A quick perusal of the digital archive of the print copies of CBW (graciously paid for and maintained by the Portland Public Library) was a walk down memory lane, especially in terms of Soley’s misadventures. I particularly enjoyed the cover story by my pal Al Diamon (here’s the link to the Library’s PDF) entitled “My Own Private Portland” that’s a biographical portrait of Soley combined with a snapshot of a typical Soley-violation: a sketchy liquor license deal with the popular Seamen’s Club Restaurant (which became Bull Feeney’s and is currently Henry’s Public House) and the illegally-dug basement dive bar Leo’s Billiards. (Which is now, apparently, a basement storefront psychic.) The 1994 story also included a then-current inventory of Soley properties.

Al Diamon’s story is full of interesting factoids, like how Soley first settled in Camden, in the mid-1970s, with all sorts of real estate schemes…I mean deals, where he was a headache for inspectors, tenants and investors alike. Soley’s troubles convinced him to leave mid-coast Maine to try his luck down in the Old Port. "I talked to officials in Camden," Portland city inspector Sam Hoffses told CBW. "They said it was the happiest day of their lives when he moved to Portland."

His first purchase upon arriving in the Old Port in the mid-1980s was the Seamen’s Club building, which soon became a popular restaurant and bar. Thanks to recessions, bankruptcies and his own very deep pockets, Soley bought as much as property as he could, wishing he could own all of the Old Port. Thus, his corporate name Monopoly Inc., which, according to Maine Secretary of State’s database has been in “good standing” since 1986. Curiously, the company’s official name on state records is JOBAR, a combination of his first name and that of his wife Barbara, who died in 1967. JOBAR was also the name for his real estate company in Baltimore that he built, according to legend, before moving to Camden.

Soley v. the World, et al

Gotta wonder how much cash Soley squandered on legal bills over the years. On multiple cases, he appealed and appealed lower court decisions all the way up to the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine. Consider, for instance, Soley’s conviction in 1987 for shoplifting a pair of moccasins from L. L. Bean in Freeport. Soley was arrested in the parking lot by “security guards” after they watched him walk out of the store without paying for the brand new pair of shoes he was wearing on his feet. After being found guilty and fined $250, Soley appealed the decision up to the Supreme Judicial Court, claiming he had “permission” to wear the slippers out of the store. The judges didn’t buy his tale and the lower court’s judgement was affirmed.

The shoplifting bust wasn’t the only time Soley was arrested for bad behavior. According to Al Diamon’s story in CBW, the slumlord was arrested again in 1990 and charged with criminal threatening after allegedly telling a former employee (who was picketing outside one of Soley's restaurants, claiming he had not been paid), "You're going to get shot for this.”

Most of Soley’s offenses, however, were so-called civil infractions, such as his constant failure to apply for proper permits and his countless safety and fire code violations. It’s weird, though, how Soley’s repeated intentional neglect that could’ve caused death or serious injury — like not fixing smoke detectors or making necessary electrical repairs or removing the piles of flammable garbage in various apartment buildings — is considered civil, but stealing a pair of shoes from a mega-corp is called criminal.

Also, like most rich dudes that are also penny-pinchers, Soley tried to save a buck however he could, legal or not. And sometimes he’d get caught. Like on Halloween night in 1995 when the Maine Marine Patrol showed up at the Seamen’s Club looking for short lobsters. A Yarmouth lobsterman had been busted for keeping illegally small bugs and ratted out Soley as a happy customer. So the fish cops raided the kitchen and started measuring crustaceans in a storage tank. Turns out at least 14 lobsters were smaller than legally permitted. I can’t find any references to the eventual outcome of the case, but at the time, the Maine Patrol officer told me the fine would probably be at least $405.

Soley also tangled with the notoriously litigious ASCAP, who sued him at least three times. According to another story I wrote for CBW, Soley refuse to pay the live music licensing fees for Leo’s Billiard’s which, back in the mid-90s, had a pretty happening small stage. ASCAP also sued Soley for not paying the licensing fees to play CDs of Stevie Wonder, Don Henley, Jimmy Page and more at Shamrocks, another Soley-owned Old Port dive bar. Soley claimed he didn’t have to pay the fees because of his monthly subscription to cable radio, which didn’t actually cover live music performance fees or the bartender’s mix-tape CDs.

One of Soley’s most egregious skinflint moves, though, was the widespread wage theft he tried to pull off a couple weeks before Christmas in 1995. That’s when all the hourly employees of Soley’s multiple restaurants and bars received an extra slip of paper in their weekly pay envelope. Not a holiday bonus. Far from it. Instead, Soley asked his employees to sign a waiver rejecting the concept of overtime pay. Which, obviously, is illegal. And at least a dozen workers provided CBW with copies of the waiver within a day of receiving the note.

Here’s the text of the document that Soley wanted his workers to sign. “I agree to waive any additional hourly pay, above my basic hourly pay, for any or all overtime hours that I may possibly have earned during any past, present or future pay periods from Monopy Inc., Baker’s Table, Seamen’s Clubs, Pizza Circus, Taps, Leo’s and Maine Madness.”

Yikes. What an asshole.

To be clear, Soley was asking his workers to enter into an “unfair contract” which was illegal because employees are not allowed to sign away their earned income. I don’t know if Soley ever followed through on his pay-less scheme or why he thought it would work in the first place. If the Labor Department, however, had discovered he wasn’t paying OT wages, he could’ve been forced to pay double the amount owed, plus legal fees and additional per incident fines. When this story broke, though, the U.S. Department of Labor was unavailable for comment because of a federal government shutdown.

Penny-wise and Pound Foolish

Perhaps the most obvious case of Soley’s bad behavior backfiring and kicking him in the ass was the 1999 decision by a jury to award ONE MILLION DOLLARS to four young women, roommates, who had been renting a nasty Soley apartment.

These are the facts of the case, verbatim, as explained in the final decision by Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court. In September 1997, the four plaintiffs, students at the University of Southern Maine, had…

[¶ 1] moved into a large apartment that was located in the Old Port area of Portland and owned by Joseph Soley. Soley had promised the tenants that the apartment, which had previously been condemned by the City of Portland, would be repaired by the time they moved in. When they arrived, the condemnation notice was still on the door. Upon entering the apartment, they found it in an uninhabitable condition.

[¶ 2] They spoke to Soley's property manager who indicated that if the tenants were willing to clean the apartment themselves, she would credit them with $750 of their $1000 monthly rent for the month of September. They rented a steam cleaner, bought various cleaning supplies, and cleaned the apartment themselves. Soley's property manager also suggested that they buy a new refrigerator and deduct it from the rent because the one in the apartment did not work.

[¶ 3] Despite their efforts to clean the apartment, the tenants continued to have problems with infestations of mice and cockroaches, as well as a persistent odor of cat urine. A dead cat was eventually found beneath the floorboards. The apartment had no heat during the month of October. One tenant slept with blankets over her head, not only because of the cold, but also to keep bugs away from her. These problems persisted into November, and the tenants submitted to Soley a list of complaints including a broken skylight, a broken toilet, a broken garbage disposal, a leaking roof, and cockroach infestation. As winter arrived, snow would fall into the living room through the broken skylight. When Soley did not make the needed repairs, the tenants stopped paying rent. During this period, Soley telephoned them on several occasions regarding the rent and spoke to the tenants in a rude and abrasive manner. In February, the property manager told the tenants that Soley had begun eviction proceedings against them.

[¶ 4] The tenants eventually found another place to live and had begun moving out by April 1, 1998. While the tenants were in the process of moving out, but were away from the apartment, Soley's agents broke into the apartment and took many of the tenants' remaining belongings. Upon confrontation with the returning tenants and police officers who had been called to the scene, Soley's agents indicated that Soley had directed their actions. Eventually, the officers and one of the tenants went to an apartment nearby and recovered some, but not all, of the missing property.

[¶ 5] The tenants then sought out Soley to request that he return their remaining possessions. They located him at his restaurant, the Seamen's Club. According to one of the tenants, he replied that he would return their property only after they paid him $3000. He then ordered them to leave and threatened to call the police and have them forcibly removed. Soley told the tenants that he knew where they were moving and where their families lived, a statement that the tenants took as a threat.”

I covered this Soley trial during a year-long job as the “Northern New England Correspondent” for a now-defunct national radio network called Metro. (AKA MetroSource.) Unfortunately, I don’t have my notes or text or audio connected to the trial or Soley’s illuminating courthouse steps press conference.

Thanks to Soley’s rejection of the discovery process and court orders, the judge instructed jurors to consider the testimony they heard from Soley’s ex-tenants to be factual. And a surprise witness sealed the deal. One of Soley’s former managers took the stand to verify that the plaintiffs’ allegations were not only believable, but par for the course for Soley. And the ex-manager had the receipts to prove it. Then the judge told the jury to determine damages.

Unlike most tenant-landlord disputes involving Soley, in this case, the parties injured by Soley had the legal team and resources to pursue the slumlord. (If I remember correctly, one of the young women may have worked as a nanny for an attorney who listened to her horror stories and realized this was a solid lawsuit.) The case the plaintiffs’ lawyer presented to the jury was an extremely convincing narrative of the hellishness that came from renting housing from Soley.

On that sunny day in June, back in 1999, while awaiting the jury’s verdict, Soley and I and couple others hung out for an hour or two outside a courtroom in the Cumberland County Superior Courthouse. He and I occasionally discussed Portland-related political gossip and other scuttlebutt. I don’t remember him as being nervous at all.

Until the jury came back with the MILLION dollar verdict, that is. Then Soley was shocked, pissed and worried. Everybody in the courtroom, including the plaintiffs and their lawyers, seemed surprised by the size of the judgment. Even divided by four plaintiffs, the payout would still a big chunk of change. The jury, it appeared, wanted to teach the serial slumlord a lesson. “It will sure make it easier to afford college,” one of the victors told the Portland Press Herald.

A couple minutes later, Soley held an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps. After years of keeping his mouth (mostly) shut, Soley was finally facing the media. And I was front and center, holding my Metro Networks microphone right in his face and asking a whole bunch probing questions, which resulted in several good soundbites.

Soundbites for the other reporters, though. Not for me. Because at the end of the press conference, when I reached into my official radio correspondent bag to hit the STOP button on my Marantz PMD221 tape deck, I noticed that both the PAUSE and RECORDING button were pressed down, which meant I HAD NOT actually been recording. Thing is, several times during the press conference I looked in the bag and checked the PMD221’s mic meter and saw that the needle was jumping, indicating Soley’s levels through my mic were good. Unfortunately, the PMD221’s simultaneous RECORD/PAUSE meter activity was an actual feature of the rig, not a bug, intended to allow the recordist to set proper mic levels before rolling tape.

All that to say, I screwed up bad. Neglecting to un-press PAUSE is still the most boneheaded technical mistake I’ve made in over three decades of journalism. And made for a very embarrassing phone call to my national newsroom bosses. I’d been promising a juicy SLUMLORD LOSES BIG audio package that would be of interest to our hundreds of network affiliate radio stations across America. And I had nothing.

Ironically, I did have a $25 bonus added to my next paycheck because of “mic-flag bounty” program paid to Metro reporters whenever the network logo appeared on TV or in newspaper stories. And as you can see below, the photo is still in use by the Portland Press Herald.

As Soley did with most legal matters, he appealed the million dollar judgement and the case made it all the way to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. And in 2000, the high court affirmed the OG jury’s decision and told Soley to shut up and pay up, including 8 percent interest compounded during the appeal process.

For biz-law buffs, Soley’s bad behavior in connection to this case is immortalized in Chapter 28 of the biz law textbook, “Landlord and Tenant Law in a Nutshell” by David Hill, Professor of Law, Emeritus University of Colorado.

Upon Soley’s death last week, this infamous case received a one sentence mention in the Portland Press Herald news story about his passing onto to the attic in the sky. “Soley was fined,” the newspaper reported, “for seizing the belongings of residents in an Exchange Street apartment building after they refused to pay rent while demanding that the landlord fix problems.”

Oddly, the newspaper left out the key detail that seems pretty friggin’ important: it was a MILLION dollar judgement (not a “fine”) paid to the tenants because Soley had his thugs break into the tenants’ apartment and steal their stuff.

You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

The last story I published about Soley was in 2002 in CBW concerning an ordinance proposed by the Portland City Council aimed at stopping Soley from seizing (and using) his commercial tenants’ “entertainment licenses” if they got behind on rent.

(I don’t know the final outcome of that proposal, because soon after that story ran, the entire CBW editorial crew was fired — due to the newspaper’s financial problems caused by the paper’s inept owner — and replaced by a low-budget crew of amateur “feel good” journalists, which led to the ultimate collapse of a milquetoast version CBW about a year later.)

Soon after, I moved all the way downeast to Washington County and my reportorial focus shifted away from Portland. Even though I stopped paying attention to Soley’s antics, it became apparent that he was basically a trope. Over the years, I’ve seen many different versions of this “Rich man from ‘away’ comes to town and tries to take it over” archetype in various communities across Maine. Usually the wealthy weirdo’s vision for their own private Mayberry ends up in conflict with the natives’ desires. Which leads to anger, lawsuits and temper tantrums. Then the Richie Riches usually leave “their” town behind, after sowing enough strife among the locals to give birth to feuds and hatred that live on for generations.

Soley, though, never left Portland. And his eventual million-plus dollar payment to the young women didn’t seem to have much of an impact. His slumlordian ways continued as he kept wheeling, dealing and neglecting his buildings. In 2009, for example, city officials had to evict residents of two dozen Soley apartments in the Old Port because of fire code violations.

His bullshit continued even this past spring. In May, Maine’s attorney general announced the “successful collection of over $650k” from Soley who was doing biz as “Cornerbrook LLC” and “CPSP LLC,” (a Delaware firm also owned by Soley “doing business in Maine.”) The fines and penalties were connected to an eight-year battle with regulators over Soley’s refusal to get required Clean Water Act permitting for a couple strip-malls he owned near Long Creek Watershed Management District in South Portland. Once again, his stubbornness cost Soley plenty. The initial civil judgement against him was for $250,000, but since Soley put off paying — for years — he ended spending an additional $400,000 in late fees and interest.

Soley apologists are gonna complain that I’m not giving Soley enough credit for his alleged good deeds and his support of Maine arts. That’s true. I witnessed his lousiness as a lyin’ slumlord and cheatin’ business owner, so it’s pretty clear to me that Soley’s #1 concern was being a rich dude, no matter the cost.

That’s why I find the 2013 theft of six N.C. Wyeth paintings from Soley’s personal private Monument Square apartment so amusing.

At the time, the FBI offered a $20,000 reward for info leading to the arrest of the thieves, saying the heist was the most significant property theft in Maine history. (Which is surprising, since N.C. was the least talented of the Wyeth clan of artists.)

First of all, the Wyeths stolen weren’t even Andrew’s or Jamie’s. Secondly, according to the Portland Press Herald, court documents indicated the paintings were worth, collectively, around a million. Soley, though, estimated that the artwork was worth about $50 million.

Other amusing details about the caper: Initially, Soley suspected that an attendee of a book club meeting he held at the apartment a couple months earlier was responsible for the grand larceny. (Soley was wrong.) In late 2014, the FBI busted a trio of dudes in California after recovering 4 of the 6 paintings at a Beverly Hills pawn shop called “The Dina Collection” (the actual locale for the reality show Beverly Hills Pawn) where one of the fellas traded the art for a $100,000 loan.

The feds got a break in the case after a Texas state trooper pulled over then-65-year-old Lawrence Estrella, of Manchester, New Hampshire for speeding. The cop claimed to smell weed and searched Estrella’s vehicle. That’s when four of the six Wyeths were found, well-wrapped, in the trunk. The cop let him go, then realized his mistake and notified the FBI, who put on a tail on Estrella when they found him in North Hollywood. By following Estrella, the FBI was eventually break the rest of the case open, after someone involved, it appears (either a middle man or the pawn shop owner) snitched. Estrella pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Oscar Roberts, the music producer and rapper who “pawned” the paintings, also plead guilty got 28 months.

“It means a lot to me that the paintings have been returned,” Soley told the media in the summer of 2015 after authorities announced the convictions. “The FBI has done a brilliant job investigating the case.”

The last two missing paintings were recovered later that year, according to the FBI, “when a third party surrendered them to retired FBI agent Jim Siracusa in the greater Boston area. That individual, who wishes to remain anonymous, directed Mr. Siracusa to turn the artwork over to the FBI, which for months has been aggressively working towards its successful recovery.”

No further arrests were made and Soley went to his grave, at age 93, not knowing which friend or family member actually stole the paintings. A memorial service was held on Dec. 15 at Etz Chaim Synagogue, followed by his burial at Mt. Sinai Cemetery in Portland. In lieu of flowers, his family requested that donations in Soley’s memory be made to the Portland Museum of Art.

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