Nightmare tenants smash up house, leave dog poo everywhere and have toilet in the middle of the kitchen
A LETTING agent was threatened with having the “flesh of his face ripped off” when he evicted a nightmare tenant who had left dog poo everywhere.
Tenant Danny – who lived in the filthy house with his girlfriend and her toddler – then smashed up the whole house when he finally left, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.
In scenes that will air in tonight’s Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords, Paul finds the house left in a state of disarray, with stinking piles of rubbish piled up in the corners and dog poo littered throughout.
The episode also sees housing officers stumble across an industrial scale weed farm in an abandoned pub in North London.
The officers are shocked to find modern slaves living in cramped conditions – and shockingly find a TOILET in the middle of the kitchen.
Wild parties, drugs and brawls
Paul, who runs his own property management company, had high hopes when he rented the two-bed house in a terraced street to young dad Danny and his friend Simon – but it wasn’t long before the complaints started pouring in.
One neighbour told the agent that the pair played “banging” music “so loud I couldn’t hear my TV” from 3pm on a Saturday until to 6am on Sunday.
Another said: “The smell of cannabis is seeping into my house. I have kids and I don’t want that.”
On a visit to the property, Paul spots large holes in several of the doors but Danny blames housemate Simon, saying “he has bad anger.”
Danny promises to fix the doors and clean up the flat but, after more complaints from the neighbours, Paul and wife Deborah return to the house to evict him.
“It’s getting quite serious now,” he says. “They’re trashing the house, causing havoc on the street so they’ve got to go.
“This can’t carry on – I want them out.”
‘I’ll rip the flesh off your face’
Danny’s girlfriend, who has moved into the squalid house with her toddler is the only one in when they arrive.
She makes a call and an unnamed friend unleashes a foul-mouthed rant on Paul.
He shouts: “Listen ‘C***’, I’m giving you two minutes to get away.
“You with the four eyes, I’m giving you two minutes to get away, or I’m going to come over and rip the flesh off your face.”
Then Danny shows up and kicks off in the street, shouting and swearing and threatening a neighbour.
Inside, the house is in a shocking state, with rubbish strewn over the floors near the baby’s cot, and a broken bike in the living room.
Deborah says: “That’s how they think they can behave in someone else’s property… If I was their mum I would be heartbroken, distraught.”
After talking to Deborah, Danny calmly agrees to pay £200 for the damaged doors and to move out within two weeks.
But when Paul returns to the house, his worst fears are realised and he’s met with a devastating sight.
Danny may have finally left – but not without some parting gifts.
The doors are smashed, the window locks yanked off and broken furniture litters the rooms. In the kitchen, every cabinet door has been ripped off and graffiti has been sprayed in the living room.
Faced with a bill for thousands, furious Paul brands the tenant “evil.”
“It’s wilful damage,” he says. “It makes me really mad, because this is just being nasty. It’s peevishness.
“One innocent placement can leave you with a bill of thousands of pounds and you’re left with a dump or a trashed house. It’s just evil. A version of evil.”
Drug factory was home to modern slaves
The show also features an unexpected find in a disused pub in Harrow, north west London.
Suspecting the abandoned building is being used as a squat, housing enforcement officer Andy Sedman and several police officers investigate, hiring a locksmith to get in through the reinforced door.
Inside, they find forests of cannabis plants in eight of the 16 rooms, as well as evidence that four more have had plants in them which have since been harvested.
In order to feed the huge number of lights and heaters needed to cultivate the plants indoors, the growers had dug in the ground and hooked up to the national grid with a potentially lethal DIY connection.
“I’ve never seen anything like those electrics,” says Andy. “They were so bad that place could have gone up in smoke.”
Although the property is empty, the officers find two beds in a tiny room and they suspect that the guardians of the weed are also victims of trafficking.
Andy is also “freaked out” to find a sink and cooker where vegetables are being chopped inches away from an exposed toilet, plumbed in in the middle of the cramped kitchen.
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“Very often when there are these money-making operations there is exploitation as well,” says Andy.
“When they’re trafficked they end up running these houses to pay for their crossing and they keep going until the debt is done or they get arrested.”
“We have to find the ones at the bottom, they’re the ones who need protecting.”
Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords is on Channel 5 at 9pm tonight.