Does everyone remember Kip and Nicole Macy, the charming couple who were trying to flip a building they owned on Clementina Street in the mid-aughts and resorted to some crazy and illegal tactics to evict the tenants who were living there? Well, they both remain in jail serving four-year sentences after evading arrest in Italy for a couple years following an indictment, and Good Morning America decided to rehash their six-year-old story yesterday just to make San Francisco's current real estate market look that much more insane.
Just to recap, Kip and Nicole bought the six-unit, three-story SoMa property in 2005, and over the course of the next couple years they attempted to evict the tenants legally before figuring out that was actually impossible. (It's unclear why they couldn't invoke the Ellis Act. Maybe they tried?) Growing frustrated they began terrorizing the tenants to try to make them move on their own. They burglarized at least one unit (that was caught on camera by another tenant), they harassed and threatened tenants, they cut phone lines, shut off power, and they poured ammonia on tenants' mattresses and belongings. In what was their finest act of batshit craziness, they decided to cut huge notches out of structural support beams under the floor of the bottom-floor unit in order to possibly maim or kill the tenants living there.
They were ultimately convicted of felony stalking, felony residential burglary, conspiracy, vandalism, and more, after which they high-tailed to Italy for three years. Then they were located and extradited in 2013, and now Good Morning America went back to talk to Kip in jail, where he's enjoying life in an orange jumpsuit.
How does he explain his and Nicole's actions? He can't. He says even they didn't understand why they were doing what they were doing by the end, driven insane by mounting debt or whatever. He admits, "Obviously we're both sort of ashamed of being here."
They even get D.A. George Gascon saying Kip and Nicole were "the dumbest criminals there are," basically because of the trail of voicemail messages and email that they left as evidence.
Mostly, Kip says, "I regret that I bought the building." But as late as last November, Kip was still trying to defend his actions, saying, "I regret, you know, having moved the Mexicans' stuff into the hallway. I don't see how that was burglary, or theft, since I neither stole their stuff... I mean, basically, if some homeless person leaves stuff in your garage and you [throw] it away, are you guilty of grand theft?"
Apparently he still doesn't get how the landlord-tenant thing works.
