How Badly Did Venezuelan Gangs Terrorize Aurora Apartment Residents and Management?

hey it's Mark Ferguson with invest for more and we're back talking about the Venezuelan gangs taking over apartments in Aurora now there is so much information coming out about these and also so much push back from people saying it's a hoax it's not real it's a right-wing conspiracy theory but the more reports that come out the more shows that these apartments probably were taken over by Venezuelan gangs and you won't believe some of the stuff that's come out recently about the interactions between the landlord and the City of Aurora all while the city of Aurora was trying to just destroy this landlord publicly so we're going talk about a few things here one of them they reached an agreement Aurora and the landlord of these apartments reached an agreement and you won't believe when they reach this agreement either for the landlord to fix them up and either sell or rent these apartments we'll talk about that we're also going to talk about Colorado law firm report claims Venezuelan Gang has strangle hold on Apartments takeover began in 2023 this is a report from a law firm that was hired by the lender for these apartments not the landlord the landlord didn't do it it was a lender who was trying to figure out what is going on with these apartments who they lent millions of dollars on they hired a law firm with some very established respected people and this report is crazy we'll go over that too and then finally um we talked about the sum 10 Venezuelan gang members have been confirmed and arrested from this apartment for various crimes from attempted murder assault burglary trespassing Etc and the stories are crazy on how that happened and those arrests and what happened with them and I know some people will be mad at me for using a Fox News article I have a Denver Post article that says the exact same thing but unfortunately I reached my limit and so I can scr down here for a bit until they make me sign up for their thing and I already signed up for a couple of their newspapers so I could give you more information about this situation and I don't want to go too crazy but basically the same information is in this article all right so how did all this get started and what really happened all right so I'll give you a brief history uh in early August it came out on the news that Aurora was kicking out 300 residents of this apartment building with 6 days notice and they were saying it was because of dilap conditions in the apartment because of this landlord who is out of state I think they're in New York Brooklyn somewhere and they're blaming it all on this landlord saying it was their fault well eventually Aurora came out and released a ton of information to the media and they released building inspection reports I covered that in a previous video I'll link to that if you really want to see them but they listed all these problems and a lot of them were potholes bent screens really minor stuff now there were some more severe stuff but a lot of them also said past like the landlord had come back and fix those items so there's this um idea out there the landlord was doing nothing just letting it go but Aurora's own documentation showed they were trying to fix stuff were trying to repair stuff while Aurora was just throwing them under the bus like crazy another thing Aurora released too was a nuisance letter which showed this property wasn't evicted for code violations it was evicted for crime they sent a nuisance letter showing hundreds of crimes and said the landlord had to U this crime or else they would shut down the building which is what they did it since come to light they're trying to do the same nuisance letter with other apartments this landlord owns too which is strange because we're going to show you this agreement that came about as well which is crazy but anyway after this happened um rumors came about that a Venezuelan gang had taken over the apartment and that's what the landlord said the landlord even hired their own PR firm and said hey a Venezuelan Gang has taken over this apartment we can't go there it's not safe for us to maintain it we can't fix things anymore the police won't help us nobody will help us that's why it's in such bad shape and they did admit yes 3 months ago we stopped going there we stopped collecting rent I believe even we stopped taking care of it because it's not safe for us to go there and they try to get help from a number of people that we have documented and were pretty much denied on every front until this came about and more proof came about what is happening then um we're starting to see theity city mayor people saying oh yeah well maybe maybe there was a problem you know before we were saying it's all the landlord's fault but yeah now that all this information is coming out maybe there really was a problem with this apartment building so um let's start here with this agreement which is crazy that's not it sorry right here all right owner of gang affected apartment building negotiates agreement with a roar to sell or lease property now I saw this come out I'm like oh that's interesting I wonder what kind of agreement they came that came about through this but I couldn't believe when it took place so Aurora officials agreed to drop all charges against the owner of the Aspen Grove Apartment Complex in exchange for selling the property leasing it or a similar disposition in assuming the cost to board up and secure the building the Denver Gazette has learned this is one of the newspapers I had to pay for by the way under agreement negotiated between the city and known Partners officials agreed to drop dozens of charges against Zev bomgarden for following to maintain the property failing to maintain the property at 1568 Nom and Aurora um I should also mention I got lots of police reports and went through all the crime at this building in a previous video too but I don't want to rehash and redo everything um because those videos will become hours and hours long all right so in exchange bomb Garten agreed to wave his right to a speedy trial and known Partners LLC agreed to sell or lease a property and among other things pay up to $60,000 of the cost to clean up and secure the complex notably the agreement said that apartment owners May ret tenant the building provided the building is in compliance with city code they're allowing them to keep it release it as long as they fix it up um court documents show that Barm guy was also charged for similar violations for his edge of lowry apartments at 1258 Dallas these two complexes well as the Whispering Pines complex have all been affected by gangs um based in Brooklyn yes has 11 properties in Denver Royal col Springs peblo um last month officials shuttered Aspen evicting 300 people now you got to keep reading um they blamed it on Venezuelan gangs as early as June an attorney representing the landlord sent a flurry of letters obtained and authenticated by the Denver Gazette to police state and local officials seeking help with the Venezuelan gang which the lawyer said had forcibly taken control of the property now this is months before it was shut down so this isn't the landlord saying oh um after the fact after all this happened Venezuelan gangs took over this is them sending letters and asking for help months before this story was out before the eviction happened they were trying to get help way before the eviction this is interesting too the landlord also sought to hire off-duty police officers to provide security for the properties a request that the Aurora Police Department declined he was told we didn't have the Staffing to provide adequate security at all his properties Joe mland and Aurora Police spokesman has said of the police department's conversations with Bomb Garden the police department is roughly at 90% of its authorized compliment with 682 sworn officers according to most recent city data so he asked for help from the police to actually hire them off duty and why they don't that's odd they would say they don't have the um ability to provide that service because it's off duty and is there that many off duty security needs that they not only don't have enough police maybe for regular police force but to have security afterwards that was odd and I guess Aurora can control off-duty security for their police I'm not sure I'm not a criminal investigator or anything or have any ties to that so maybe someone who does can let me know how that works um all right get rid of that um that's more in the game we'll talk about that um they bought the property for 12 million in 2019 oh here we go this is the interesting part the agreement with Aurora was signed on August 12th a day before the city evicted about 300 residents and boarded up the property the agreement between the property owner and the city gave Aurora permission to evict residents on August 13th so I've been saying all along it's really strange how they they evicted them in 6 days landlords can't do that I know people keep emailing well you can do a 3-day notice to evict in Colorado yes you can give someone a notice to pay it's not 3 days anymore now it's 10 days you can give them 10 days to catch up on rent and and after those 10 days you go to court you don't just evict them you go to court you wait for your court date which could be weeks away you go to court if the court approves it which they may not then you have to go to the sheriff and schedule the eviction with the sheriff that could also be weeks away so your eviction if it goes really really smooth might be 30 days out in reality it's probably closer to 60 may even 90 days out in some of these really busy areas with tons of court cases and busy Sheriff deputies so um six day eviction is unheard of I'm like how did they even do that how were they able to do this and part of it was because they did it for Crime not for um code violations which we found out in that nuisance letter and they had permission from the property owner to do it which they needed so after this came out after Aurora evicted these people and took tons of heat for evicting them so quickly they threw all everything at the landlord saying it's his fault they'd already signed an agreement with a landlord who agreed to fix it who was helping them out and working with them in this situation I could not believe the date I saw that and that Aurora was continuing to just throw him under the bus I'm not saying he's a good guy I'm not I don't know him I have no connection to him at all I don't know exactly how well the property is maintained before all this happened there could have been egregious problems massive problems he could just be an awful landlord I don't know for sure I'm not trying to say he's good but this is crazy they had agreement to fix up the property make it better and aora continued to throw them under the bus after that agreement so um that was a very strange strange development now it gets worse all right so here's this Colorado law firm report that claims Venezuelan Gang has strangle hold the apartments takeover began in 2023 now I mentioned before there's tons of people saying this is right-wing propaganda it's not true vene and gangs didn't take over people at the apartment say it didn't happen well there are a number of um different videos out there from tenants who say yeah it it wasn't taken over there's also a few that say yes it was and go into detail about having to pay rent to gang members being threatened um all kinds of horrible issues and the police have the chief of police so they went through the building and said they didn't see any signs of gangs and my response to that is well all right if I'm a gang member and the police are going through the building and they showed a video with police everywhere am I going to go in the hall and announce myself as a gang member from Venezuela like they didn't have warrants they couldn't just break down doors and look for them and the police himself have said over and over again it's extremely hard to identify gang members from Venezuela they don't admit it they don't come out and and tell you it took them a while to um identify the 10 arrests they made to confirm they from Venezuela and were they just going to come out in the hallway and start attacking police so I don't think that really proves a whole lot there and if you're a resident in a building controlled by gang members and you're being interviewed on a video that's being shown to many people are you going to say that there's gang members extorting you in committing criminal acts in the same building you live in where those gang members are going to see you on TV and these gang members have been known to um just be absolutely brutal with anybody who crosses him I would say no you're probably going to keep your mouth shut or say there's no problem um that's just saving your own skin and being smart so I know that's kind of the proof that these people have this not happening but then we have the documents and crime in this report which is crazy all right um a Denver Law Firm hired to look into the alleged gang takeover of an aurora apartment building says they found the Venezuelan Tren de aruga AR aruga sorry began taking over the Whispering Pines Apartments in late 2023 um since then the Gang has engaged in violent assaults threats of murder extortion Strongarm tactics and child prostitution as they have exerted a strangle hold on the Aurora apartment complex that's according to a letter sent to Aurora Mayor Mike Kaufman Aurora city manager Jason Bachelor and the interim police chief that was obtained by CBS News Colorado um so they were sent this I believe yes August 9th before the shutdown there was some news coming out about it being shut down but they received all this report over a month ago and afterwards just continued to say there was no evidence nothing to see here just move along and I want to say too I'm in gy Colorado I'm 50 Mi north of Aurora um I went to Aurora 2 weeks ago I had a fantasy football draft with some buddies down in Parker we played golf and Aurora at Whispering Pine I think um really not tooo far away from the apartments I probably should have driven by but I was kind of on a tight schedule and I'm not scared to go to Aurora I'm not trying to say that Aurora is awful and everybody's under control of the gangs we're just talking about these particular apartments and what's been happening there so I know a lot of people are telling me that I'm racist and awful for talking about this situation because I'm hurting Denver or hurting immigrants in reality these apartments are full of immigrants who are being hurt by these gang members and they're the ones who need help um so that's not at all what we're trying to do here we're trying to bring to light what's going on and honestly how bad would this have gotten what would have happened if this all didn't come to light and would would those same arrests have been made um would these videos come out of what's happening if people weren't talking about it bringing it to light and forcing some action to be taken okay back to this um so Marcus Funk who did this was a former US attorney like I said a very well respected person made this report um Funk did not respond to emails or phone calls and this is CBS News Colorado doing this uh the second the law firm did not respond but the firm says it represents the lender for Whispering Pine's apartment and this is a different apartment complex owned by the same landlord so this isn't the one shut down where the 10 arrests were made this is another one so when people say oh it's just one apartment no it's it's happening in multiple places um the apartment buildings allegely controlled by the trend de aruga aruga aruga King the law firm says it interviewed Witnesses and reviewed video from the Whispering Pines for its investigation letter marks the first time specific details have been revealed about how the gang allegedly took over the apartments and how they have been operating the Gang has threatened to kill and in certain instances has apparently actively attempted to kill members of Whispering Pines management according to the report here's some of the video by the way of people breaking in to Apartments um people said that wasn't happening there was multiple videos showing this happening a lot of people said the gang members would take over Apartments put squaders in there then start collecting rent investigators interviewed the property manager who had 15 years of experience in the industry the property manager said he had never seen anything remotely like the gang takeover of the whine Pines in his entire career was Pines consists of 54 apartments with rent ranging from 1450 2,000 per month according to the report tenants are generally workingclass Hispanic families with children the property manager told the law firm that he started his job in January 2024 but that TDA that's a better way to say it had already been establishing a presence at the apartments before his employment in November 2023 the report States a consultant for the property management company was so severely beaten and stomped by gang members that he had to go to the hospital the report says the beating was unprovoked the gang activity at Whispering Pines escalated in 2024 according to the document obtained by CBS News Colorado in April 2024 a housekeeper called the property manager for in informing him that two individuals at the property went into an apartment came out with large firearms and were coming to kill him parentheses the property manager the IND individuals were apparently passed du unret the property manager said that the two individuals were arrested as they were coming to kill him the report says the men who were armed with large Firearms were gang members so they even arrested people coming to kill property managers who were late on rent this is back um April 2024 in 2023 a property manager was beaten we have people arrested at the other apartment in 2023 for severely beating someone so badly he thought they died and he went to hiding that person came over the border illegally was put on $20,000 bail let back out that person was then arrested again for a double shooting where someone jumped off a balcony to get away broke his ankle two other people were shot in the street I outside the apartments and that time they were put on $100,000 bail but they couldn't make it um and this is all coming from Apartments owned by the same landlord all right um the property manager went on to say that gang members allegedly stabbed a Whispering Pines resident for refusing to pay rent to the gang since then the property has recorded footage of gang members knocking on doors and without authorization or any justification attempting to collect rent from the tenants of of Whispering Pines in June the report says suspected gang members approached the property manager and offered to help the manager if he agreed to pay the gang 50% of everything the property management company collected in rent the investigators who authored a report called this an organized crime tactic they said gang members then said they were taking over vacant units at wering Pines and would start collecting rent from tenants this is our business plan one gang member told the housekeeper if he the property manager doesn't like it we'll fill him with bullets um following that incident the report says video footage shows TDA gang members violently breaking into vacant apartments kicking doors open and moving Venezuelan immigrants into the empty Apartments this conducts Brazen and public nature further exhibits the suspected gang member sense of comfort and control consisting with their taking over the property in and not fearing the law enforcement of the property management investigators concluded that gang members have been extorting rents from residents they moved into the vacant units the property manager further shared that TDA now uses the formally vacant units to host parties where they serve drugs and child prostitution um the property manager apparently told the law firm investigators that miners are a good source of money CBS news also obtained internal Aurora Police documents from June that appear to support some of the law firm's conclusion an officer reported responding to a call from a house cleaner at whine Pines he said she told police she was quote threatened and that she needed to give up the keys to the vacant apartments at the Wiis Pine Apartments so the group of Venezuelans could move people into the Wiis Pine Apartments the officer reported suspects left but not before warning her to comply or else they would kill her or her family the Aurora officer wrote to fellow officers quote I would highly recommend you guys take two to three friends with you when responding to any calls there I would sure think that indicates gang activity at those apartments and this was before any of these evictions or um PR came out about it all being the landlord's fault late Wednesday afternoon City Aurora spokesman confirmed they had received the letter and immediately included it in its ongoing investigative work the city spokesman said aora police have been and will continue to aggressively investigate and pursue any criminal activity reported onor related to the Aurora apartment buildings that have been at the center of this controversy the information and claims in the letter uncore why APD and other law enforcement agencies formed a special task force to investigate violent crime impacting migrants and other communities in the Denver metro area wrote the city spokesperson we also talked about that in a previous video they started a task force on Venezuelan gangs after this happened and then you've got the news and media and other people saying that's not related that's totally different doesn't have anything to do with these apartments and this whole time they the police knew what was going on the city knew what was going on and they're pretending it didn't exist all right there's a little bit more to go through here again I'm sure I'll get blasted for using a Fox News article and there is some um obviously they try to bring Biden and different stuff into this but we can still look at the information in this and see about the arrests that happened at a different apartment the one that was evicted ice confirms Aurora Caro gang members are in the United States illegally released by Biden Administration um the four arrested are confirmed to be Venezuelan Nationals and members of the TDA gang got that going better now um four Venezuelan members of the TR TDA Kress in Colorado have been confirmed as legal aliens per a statement from Ice spokesperson to Fox News uh ranging from 1924 they all came across the border through Texas illegally in 2022 in 2023 all four were arrested by police and IC placed detainer requests on two of them does that mean they let the other ones go probably um the four were arrested after a shooting which occurred near gnome Street apartments one of the apartment buildings in Aurora which had been overtaken by our members of TDA um these are their names we can now confirm that is a documented member of TDA he's a brother of Pacho trinos also known as cook key um I've talked about them before those are the ones who had the shootout in the street and who beat up the person before that and was released on bail for 20,000 additionally two others arrested the same day were suspected gang members um for the shooting and um then you had the other footage of people breaking into apartments right here let's see will that play let that ad run for 30 seconds jeez okay so uh the brother of cookie was arrested for attempted murder and other charges he was also apprehended at the Rio Del Rio sector Texas in October 22 um they were apprehended by border patrol agents at the Eagle Pass Texas on August 22nd 2023 the two were given notices to appear and place under Parole in the United States pending proceedings of course we know they then went on to comp complete multiple allegedly crimes oh yeah here's the video of the people breaking into apartments and I believe this is the one where they were all arrested as well confirmed to be in the um apartments and confirmed to be part of the TDA I don't know what just happened right there so yeah all this was coming out and then it's just like nope there's nothing happening here nothing at all because people would walk through the hallways and say I don't see anybody here it's fine uh that video is not working very well that was my computer doesn't like playing it uhoh it's a scene that seems to be out of a developing Nation where corruption and violence run rampant but this surveillance video is from an apartment complex in Aurora Colorado all right I was looking for another article I want to show you because I know people um say the letter I sent to say what it says because I didn't show all eight pages of it or the building inspection reports I want to show you how to find those yourself if you want to but while I was looking look at this this just came out 51 minutes ago Aurora mayor offers police protection to gang affected apartment complexes um Aurora mayor on Monday said that the city had offered after earlier denying a request which we just talked about from the landowner police protection at two gang affected apartment buildings but also threaten down the shut down the complexes if no routine services are provided soon well if they have police there who can let the property managers be there and the people do their job then maybe they can do their job has been my theory all along uh so they made an offer the city would provide two police officers for each of the properties for 2 weeks with an extension if necessary the owner would assume responsibility for these two properties and place an on-site manager in each one why didn't they just do this before and it would have saved everybody a whole lot of problems and issues and none of this probably would have come out and the whole thing weird thing is if Aurora hadn't evicted them in 6 days like even done a 30-day eviction this would would have been a story either none of this probably would have come out either so it's a lesson on many levels of PR and how to handle things I guess you'd think it would be common sense that evicting 300 people in 6 days is not good PR especially with all the talk of landlords and housing and affordable housing and but I guess yeah that's another story so um the city will be forced to close both Apartments as a last resort if they are not cleaning them up so was very interesting to see now I'm still going to look for this other article all right so I've been searching and searching and searching and I can't find that article I wonder if it was removed because it had those documents like I said I have a video going over them I'll link to it below if you want to see them I also saw Aurora heavily redacted some other um emails from the landlords and different stuff uh so there's a lot going on here but it's really really hard for anybody to claim Venezuelan gangs did not take over these apartments with everything coming out from the police reports to the report from the law firm to letters from the landlord to Aurora to Aurora starting a gang task force uh to coming to an agreement with a landlord um to allow them to kick out the apartments like why else would they kick out the apartments in that short of a time if it wasn't for crime and a serious immediate issue if it was for code violations they' let them have different code violations for years and years and years you would do it slowly or maybe you kick out some of the apartments that have the code viol let others stay there you just wouldn't kick out everybody so we'll have more updates if we we need it um this is very interesting very scary like I said I'm in Colorado I'm not trying to say all if Colorado is bad or it's dangerous or even Denver is dangerous to be and I wouldn't be worried about driving through Denver um I would be worried about living in these apartments or if I own them about going to them and managing them things like that uh I did just buy a crazy apartment up here in Northern Colorado um where I don't think we have gangs or anything like that in it but it'll be a very interesting rehab and needs a ton of work I just posted that yesterday so if you want to check that out go ahead love to hear questions and comments on this and of course we'll be back with my own Properties Real Estate advice things like that and maybe we'll do some more videos like this on different um government real estate news as well