I understand. … The police protected you and there were courts of law. You didn’t need a friend like me. But, now you come to me, and you say: “Councilman O’Farrell, give me justice.” But you don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’t even think to call me Godfather.This is just a brief episode from the saga of the cat-kicking K-Town slumlord Bryan Kim and his unholy compact with Mitch O’Farrell’s office to trade lunch money for homeless encampment clean-ups. It seems that on March 11, 2016, while Bryan Kim was still negotiating the terms of his on-demand encampment clean-up with CD13 staff, he asked CD13 scheduler David Cano for a meet with the CM himself, Mitch O’Farrell, in the first of this series of emails:
As discussed, I’d would [sic] like to request to meet with Councilmember O’Farrell re:The Homeless Encampment issue near LA City College to see how we can collectively work together on short term and sustainable permanent solution.
Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about these City Government types, it’s that they never do anything on their own. Always, it’s consultations, consultations, consultations.1 So eight minutes later David Cano wrote to Aram Taslagyan and strongarm O’Farrell consigliere Marisol Rodriguez:
Thoughts? D.O. time?
Dear kitty-cat, TAKE THAT, YOU HOMELESS P.O.S.!!! Sincerely, Mitch O’Farrell and your friends at CD13.I wrote some time ago about how CD13 staffer Aram Taslagyan organized an on-demand homeless encampment clean-up at the behest of scumbag cat-kicking Koreatown slumlord Bryan Kim, who needed it done really really fast because he had some kind of inspection forthcoming. Well, yesterday,2 I managed to get copies of some new emails between Bryan Kim and various CD13 staffies on the subject.3 In particular, on March 27, 2016, Bryan Kim wrote to CD13 District Director Marisol Rodriguez4 under the subject Recognizing Aram Taslagyan, stating e.g. that5
Aram did a great job demonstrating professional excellence and swiftly took comprehensive action to utilize his alliance with other groups such as LAPD, Sherrif, groups among others. I applaud his great effort for taking care (completely clearing all homeless encampment issues.
And what are Bryan Kim’s hopes for the future?
As of 4 days later there has still been no recurrence of them revisiting on Vermont and Marathon.
We hope to continue vigilant and collective efforts as I am in contact with Braille, LACC, local and community patrons to closely monitor any future outbreak, for which I will let Aram and lapd know.
Mitch O’Farrell and his staff: gleefully kicking “frustrating” homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013.How does the City of Los Angeles decide which homeless encampments to target for cleanup? How do they decide when to target them? Well, if these two email chains from City Council District 13 about encampment-breaking on Vermont Avenue and Marathon Street in Koreatown are any indication (one and two) they target them when non-homeless people call CD13 and tell them to clean out the homeless people.6 And what do they get out of targeting them? Well, they’re politically savvy enough to turn down free lunches offered in exchange for their dirty work, but they will accept an offer of bused-in political supporters to astroturf the public comments section of a Council meeting. First let’s look at the players involved.
Bryan Kim is a partner in Koreatown based property management company Kim and Casey, which doesn’t seem to have a website.7 They do, however, have a Yelp page. This is notable for having uniformly one star reviews, which include comments like:8
They would tell me I was picky about the filth they’d promised to clean up before I moved in but never took care of it. They wouldn’t accept responsibility and blamed everyone and everything else until they were legally forced to take control of the growing sludge and cesspool that had been forming for I don’t know how many weeks .
Aram Taslagyan: “Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. … Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.
Or, even more colorfully:
I had my sink drain burst and when I asked them to fix it they said “NO”. The reason they gave me was that I had a bathroom sink to use and I dint really need the one in my kitchen. … What kind of management company is this? Also, one day as I was looking out my window, I saw one of the three guys who were walking the property from Kim and Casey Kick my neighbors cat at he was walking down the path way. It was the middle aged guy of the three that were walking the property. I don’t know his name and don’t care to know such a scumbag.
Despite the coordinated efforts of CD13 staff to make obtaining public records as abso-fucking-lutely difficult as possible; I will write about their new scorched-earth salt-in-the-fields rights-violating law-scoffing-at tactics very soon after I file a few complaints against them with various agencies for their illegal antics. Stay tuned!
I also put all the emails on Archive.Org and created a local directory for them as well. They’re also available, although not super-directly, through our menu structure.
Who has an interesting new bio, click on it back where you came from. In it, it is explained that she is “…helping to direct policy that will improve the quality of life.” Of course, this is a common trope in the discourse of these people. They rarely say whose quality of life they’re improving. That’s because it’s not politically palatable to tell the truth, which is that by “improving the quality of life” they mean “destroying the lives of anyone who annoys, inconveniences, or otherwise interferes with their campaign donors.” Tell me how it “will improve the quality of life” to uproot a bunch of homeless people, decimating the quality of their lives, who are potentially interfering with Bryan Kim’s business model. I know it’s one of the least of their flaws, but it is just so disconcerting how these people don’t seem to believe that words have meanings.
It’s “sic” throughout.
These two fairly lengthy email chains have a significant amount of overlap, so I apologize for having to include both of them, but the differences are essential. Also, the order of the emails is scrambled in a non-standard way, so pay close attention to timestamps while you read.
For reasons that seem fairly evident after reading their Yelp page.
Screenshots of Yelp reviews are necessary because they don’t allow linking into non-recommended reviews and their algorithm switches the status of reviews frequently.
![Aram Taslagyan: "Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. ... Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/CD13_Photo_Aram_Taslagyan1_WEB.jpg)