Paolo Iantorno, Serial Evictor, Assaults 3 People, Tries to Smash My Camera 16 Oct 2014 from Peter Menchini on Vimeo.

A protest went down yesterday in Hayes Valley at the popular shoe store Paolo. It's owned by one Paolo Iantorno who, along with his father Sergio Iantorno, are among the city's most egregious Ellis Act evictors. Paolo, as you can hear in the video above, claims to know nothing about the ongoing evictions of dozens of long-term and elderly tenants from San Francisco apartment buildings, saying, "It has nothing to do with my business" and "I am not a part of those LLCs. But according to at least one of the tenants, Paolo himself signed a buyout offer pertaining to one of the buildings that underwent Ellis Act evictions.

According to Eviction Free SF, and according to this New Yorker profile from earlier this year, Sergio Iantorno is among S.F.'s "Dirty Dozen" landlords who serially attempt to evict tenants in order to flip buildings. He claims he currently owns 70 buildings citywide, and has owned hundreds over the years, most with four or fewer units, and he has his own story about the difficulties of being a landlord, and having tenants who pay $400 a month in rent but own property elsewhere, and refuse to leave.

The protest yesterday involved a couple of dozen people and at least one radio reporter. Paolo Iantorno claimed ignorance of his father's real estate dealings, but Eviction Free SF claims otherwise. (And certainly the bigger family business here is real estate, not this tiny shoe store, which appears to be a passion project for the younger Iantorno.)

Anyway, it gets heated. Cops arrive. And things cool down, as Hoodline reports.

But yet another anti-eviction protest is happening tomorrow, in which a gang of folks are marching to Ed Lee's house. Stay tuned for more on that.