The apartment next door had been empty for a while when Harold and Elena Joyce first heard voices. It was early February 2025. Harold went to investigate, worried it was another squatter — the building had dealt with a few. From the hallway, Harold could see a group of what appeared to be young Hasidic men setting up an air mattress in 2B. It was, they said, for a friend who needed a place to crash.
It was a few weeks later that Harold and Elena heard the smoke detector in 2B going off. Calls to management went unanswered, so Harold called 311, which referred him to the fire department. When firefighters broke down the door, they encountered a mostly empty unit, save for the air mattress. Harold got a text from his landlord’s son the next day: “Your neighbor from next door complained you broke into his apartment.”
It was around the same time that Harold began to receive prank calls — dozens of them a day, at all hours. “Is this Jacko? Harrod?” a man with an accent said on the phone, in a March call the Joyces recorded. “You have the girls that you rent out, right? You rent them out hourly or nightly?” Something else about this particular call alarmed the Joyces: ” He used my first and last name,” Harold told me.
Harold and Elena, both in their 40s, had lived in their second-floor loft at 56 South 11th Street for 16 years. Elena is an artist and Harold, “a nice Jewish kid from Long Island,” as he put it, is a co-founder of a whiskey distillery. They had two kids, 12 and 8. Their lives, for the most part, were uneventful but perfectly nice.
Then came the middle-of-the-night “wellness checks.” The police would arrive at the Joyces’ door, saying they were responding to anonymous 311 complaints of fighting and screaming. The second time it happened, at around 3 a.m. on a May morning, Harold recorded his interaction with the cops. “Our apartment?” he asks, his voice groggy from sleep. The person making the complaint had been specific, the officer said — the anonymous report had even included a photograph of a drawing on their door from one of the couple’s kids. Harold messaged the landlord’s son, asking for security footage of the hallway to see if anything suspicious might turn up. Harold wasn’t allowed to access that footage, the landlord’s son told him, unless it was for an official police report.
For months, the Joyces had been gathering evidence of what they saw as targeted harassment: the spam calls, the 311 reports, and the random wellness checks — all of which seemed to coincide with the mysterious neighbor’s arrival. (And all of which would find its way into a lawsuit the couple would file in Kings County Supreme Court by the year’s end.) But no matter how many times they called their landlord, no matter how egregious each incident seemed to them, they say they got little more than a shrug in response. Which, after a while, started to feel strange, too.
The Joyces moved to South 11th Street in August 2009 from a tiny fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side. The building is a converted warehouse in South Williamsburg that once housed a color printing factory for a children’s-book and board-game company in the late 19th century. Artists moved in at some point in the late 1970s and converted the mostly vacant building into living and studio spaces. The apartments are typical Brooklyn lofts: high, tin ceilings, exposed pipes and wood beams, hardwood floors, and big windows that let in so much sun that tenants generally don’t turn on lights during the day. The rent for this second-floor loft was more than what they paid in Manhattan, but it was much bigger, and “it seemed like a great adventure,” Harold said.
But not long after moving in, during the summer of 2013, tenants began receiving notices from the landlord, Wolfe Landau of Watermark Capital Group, that their rent would be going up. By a lot. Many people left, but tenants across a dozen apartments, including the Joyces’, stayed to fight the increase. The landlords stopped cashing their checks, threatened them with eviction, and took them to housing court. It was there that tenants learned the landlords had recently received J-51 status. The program provides owners with property-tax abatements to encourage renovation and rehabilitation — new boilers, updated plumbing and electrical systems. Crucially, as part of the program, all rental units become rent-stabilized for the duration of the abatement. The rent increase being threatened, then, was actually illegal. The tenants filed a counterclaim against the landlord to obtain rent-stabilized leases and won. “That was my first introduction into tenants’-rights organizing,” Harold said.
The whole thing was formative enough that Harold stayed involved in his building — he was the guy people talked to if the heat went out, and he helped other people moving in secure their own rent-stabilized leases. This was also why, after feeling that their complaints about harassment had largely been ignored, the Joyces started to suspect their landlord was up to something, too. The timing seemed loaded: The tax abatement at the center of all that legal wrangling in 2013 was set to expire in June 2027. The landlord would go back to paying the full amount of their property-tax bill but would no longer be obliged to keep the apartments rent-stabilized — after taking care of a few essential steps along the way. (“The landlord does have to give you very, very specific notice requirements,” per Oksana Mironova, housing-policy analyst with the Community Service Society.)
But the Joyces, and many of the other tenants in the building, say they never received anything like that — no new rent-stabilized lease since they sued in 2013; no J-51 “rider” with every lease to inform them of the building’s status. (Landau, the landlord, denied this — “Every tenant has a rider,” he said.) Failure to give those proper notices, according to the Department of Homes and Community Renewal, means the apartment stays rent-stabilized until the tenant moves out. And Harold and Elena had no plan to move out.
But what if something changed their mind? Like a neighbor who let the smoke alarm go off for a week at a time or a series of police visits in the middle of the night. “Having me in the building would make their goal of destabilizing all of these units more difficult,” Harold said. Other tenants in the building had their own suspicions that the landlord was up to something. They claim upkeep had fallen off — snow shoveling, pest control, typical maintenance. And tenants in other rent-stabilized buildings owned by Wolfe Landau and Watermark Capital described similar patterns: deferred maintenance and a lack of responsiveness to general complaints. “There’s garbage everywhere, there’s rat problems,” another tenant in the Joyces’ building told me. “You know, I feel like it’s quite intentional.”
There’s no conspiracy, according to Wolfe Landau, the principal at Watermark Capital Group. When he bought 56 South 11th in 2004, “it was falling apart.” He put work into the building, and now he’s waiting to start collecting real rents. Yes, he’s letting vacant apartments stay empty, he told me, but that’s perfectly legal. “I won’t rent it right now because if I rent it next year, six months from now, I’m gonna get free-market rent,” he said. “Of course I’m waiting until my J-51 expires.”
As for Harold? “He’s a miserable person. And he decided to make my life miserable for no reason at all,” Landau said. Any allegations about how he managed his buildings or ran his business were baseless. “I’m not looking to make the last dollar to torture my tenants,” he said. “I take care of my tenants. I treat people like human beings.”
So much so, in fact, that he let someone going through a hard time stay in one of his empty apartments while he got back on his feet. The person staying in 2B, right next to Harold, was a friend’s son, he said. “He’s a kid. This kid was sleeping on the street,” Landau told me. “Around here I’m known for that. I do a lot of this type of stuff. I gave him an apartment. I get nothing from him. Just put him to sleep there.”
If anything, Harold was actually the one doing the harassing, Landau said — “torturing” the poor kid sleeping next door, who was in a motorcycle accident that left him disabled. “Everybody should be helping him.” The new neighbor’s name was Moshe.
Moshe was apparently starting to develop a reputation with other tenants in the building. He often looked a little disheveled, neighbors said. People noticed his ankle monitor. In late September, after Moshe had been in the building off and on for months, another neighbor got into an argument with him about whether or not he had a lease for the apartment. Elena witnessed the argument and tried explaining to Moshe their concerns about previous squatters in the building. A week later, in early October, Elena stepped out of their apartment and saw Moshe waiting for the elevator. Both started filming the other. In that footage, Elena asks him if he’s squatting. Moshe tells her it’s none of her business. She accuses him of trespassing and of following another neighbor to her apartment. He asks her how she would know he was trespassing and says, “I’m going to put this video everywhere, all right, with your apartment number.” Elena called for Harold, who ran out in his boxers — both men screamed at each other and threatened to call the cops.
That evening, Harold received a text from Elena: “Call me. It’s an emergency.” She had just gotten off the phone with the city’s Administration for Children’s Services. An anonymous hotline call had been placed sometime that day, alleging there was “screaming, excessive consumption of alcohol, and child abuse occurring” in their apartment, and an ACS agent needed to investigate the claim.
” That was not something I ever, ever — in my wildest, most catastrophic catastrophizing that I usually do — ever thought would be a factor,” Elena said. The report led to visits from agents at the kids’ schools and interviews with teachers, friends, and family. The claim was ultimately confirmed by the department as unfounded. ” I feel that something in me kind of broke in that moment. I just was ready to take my kids and get out of New York City,” Elena said.
In November, the Joyces sued. In a suit filed against Moshe (“John Doe”), Dov Land USA LLC, which owns the building, as well as Wolfe and his son, Mordechai Landau, the Joyces allege a harassment campaign that began soon after Moshe moved in next door and that, as the harassment escalated, the landlords “have been consistently made aware of such harassment and have at all times continued to ignore and enable such conduct.” In their response to the lawsuit, the landlords deny all of this, writing that the tenant in 2B, Moshe, was given permission “to use and occupy” the apartment “for living purposes only.”
Things stayed tense through the winter. One day in mid-December, the Joyces’ car was towed from outside their building. When Harold and Elena picked up the car in East Flatbush, they managed to convince the tow-truck driver to share the phone number of the man who had called in the tow.
And it was through a public-records report associated with the phone number that the Joyces learned Moshe in 2B was Moshe Berger, who was almost 30 and out on bail in a federal interstate extortion-threat case in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors say Berger followed and threatened a man to whom he’d lent money then demanded he be paid $750,000 “to resolve the case” or else he would kill him. (In a letter filed in that case, one of Berger’s previous attorneys writes that his client was the true victim in this incident — “a person with a severe disability” who was preyed upon for a payout from his personal-injury case.) Multiple requests for comment to Berger’s lawyers went unanswered.
”All of this was publicly documented,” Harold said of the allegations against Berger.
In February 2026, a full year after he first showed up on South 11th, Berger disappeared from the building. He had apparently violated the terms of his bond. Soon after, in March, the super and other landlord representatives began knocking on doors in the building, asking tenants to sign a form notifying them of the upcoming J-51 expiration.
The Joyces’ lawsuit is still pending in state court. Moshe was subpoenaed in early May. (Later that month, he was remanded to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center for again violating the terms of his pretrial release. Prosecutors are also asking he be evaluated for competency.) The Joyces are set to be deposed when discovery is complete. Until then, it’s just waiting. Elena and Harold are unsure how the case will turn out, but they’re determined to stay, they told me. Where else would they go? They built a life on South 11th Street. “It’s a big thing to have that sense of stability,” Elena said of their longtime home. Harold agreed: “It’s something worth fighting for.”
