The illegal gambling den that subleased space in the former Fizzary soda shop on Mission Street has now taken root in the Bayview, Mission Local reports. Maybe the Bayview really is "the next Mission," as a problematic and now pulled advertisement for apartments in the neighborhood claimed.

A longstanding nuisance and even the site of a 2015 shooting while in the Mission, the gambling den was shut down twice, once temporarily and the second time seemingly for good. Fizzary proprietor Taylor Peck, the tenant of the Mission Street space who lived above the storefront, sublet the ground-floor place to a couple and a woman who claimed they were opening an Herbalife shop. Instead, they opened an all-hours illegal gambling and drinking parlor. But Peck couldn't get the police to take action even after four months of desperate late-night 911 calls. Finally, he vandalized his own former business, spray painting "HEY SFPD SFFD ABC ↓ ILLEGAL CLUB ↓" and "ILLEGAL ↑ DANGEROUS." That sort of worked: In December 2015, Peck was evicted from the space, and the gambling den was forced out after him.

That didn't last, because the building owner's real estate broker got duped by the same people. By fall 2016 it was once again a gambling den in full swing. "They evicted me and brought in a proper real estate broker and fell for the exact scam,” Peck tells Mission Local. “I was just renting the front part to them as sublet. This broker signed a deal that allowed them 100 percent access to entire building — they got keys to kingdom.”

Eventually, SFPD was able to "develop enough reason to get in there to get a signed search warrant to have legal authority to go in there and seize possible evidence of crime that was occurring," Public Information Officer Robert Rueca tells Mission Local, characterizing the process as "a cat and mouse game."

Now a Bayview tenant with a two-story commercial studio warehouse space near Bayshore Boulevard says he's the victim of the same scam. That tenant, whose name Mission Local is withholding for the sake of their anonymity — he fears reprisal from his landlord — identified that at least one person on the sublease agreement for his studio space is the same as one at the Fizzary space. That's Blanca Leticia Mendez Rubi, who confirmed subletting the Fizzary's former space and now subletting the Bayview space in a conversation with Mission Local, but denied illegal operations at both. Mendez Rubio was one of a group who said they wanted to run a janitorial business out of the Bayview space, the tenant of record says.

Peck's heart goes out to the Bayview tenant, he tells Mission Local. “They stopped paying rent [for the Fizzary space] they minute they got in there,” said Peck. “It takes three months to evict someone through the legal process. It takes about one month for the owner to figure it out, so they bank on moving somewhere new every three months.”

Previously: Former Fancy Soda Shop Once Again A Late-Night Gambling Den