When Catalina Romero bought her Little Village home back in 1973 she thought she would live in it forever. “When we moved there my husband didn’t want to move,” she says. “He said it was too much money, and he didn’t like the house. I told him, ‘That’s all right. I can buy the house. I can put it in my name, and you can move in and pay rent.’ My daddy, he sent me a telegram with the money from Texas the next day.” She proudly unfolds the original bill of sale, which shows she paid $10,000 for the three-story brick house at 2844 W. 21st St.
Romero was horrified by what she saw when she got back into the house. The walls on the top two floors were crumbling, and the roof was charred and open to the sky. The only space that was even close to habitable was one of the first-floor apartments. “The fire was just upstairs in the attic–not in the walls, but in the ceiling,” she complains. “When the fire department came, they just put water over everything. They broke the windows and just threw water. They didn’t have to do all that.”
A few months later she hired another crew. “They put a paper in the window saying they had a permit to fix the house,” she says. “Some inspector came over there and said, ‘Who put that paper in the window?’ He said, ‘Those guys bought it like they bought the papers to work here.’ So I lost them again. Two times I tried to fix it.”
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In the spring of 1999 another of Romero’s daughters, Lisa Rubio, saw an ad in the Sun-Times: “Ugly homes wanted for television commercials in this area. We need Ugly Homes with Ugly Kitchens, Bathrooms, inside or outside that need fixing or remodeling really bad! We will Repair and Remodel them and shoot video for training film or future TV commercial on Home Remodeling Work….Act now, Don’t delay! Atlas Custom Builders, Inc. Operators on Duty 24 Hrs. Daily and Sunday. Call Today! Free Call.”
Romero, who was by then living with another of her daughters, figured that Atlas could quickly make some of the apartments livable, then she could rent them and use the money to make her loan payments. She says the Atlas representative assured her that wouldn’t be a problem.
Romero didn’t understand balloon payments, and she didn’t realize that the loan was actually from First Union Home Equity Bank, not Atlas. “They said they would lend me the money,” she says, “but I didn’t know it was a loan from someplace else.” And she didn’t know that meant she’d lost some of her leverage with Atlas.
Siegal says that in the time he worked for Atlas, Ross never set out not to do work he was contracted for. “In the beginning he had plenty of money coming in and plenty of money going out,” he says. “Towards the end there were problems.”
