Inside Aurora apartments made infamous by gang takeover claims, residents wonder what’s next

As children in backpacks laughed and ran past their apartment, Sorali Leon and Manuel Ledezma readied their three daughters for school.

Like he does every day, Ledezma took the children from the family’s Whispering Pines apartment in Aurora and dropped them off on his way to a local junkyard, where he works as a mechanic. After they left, Leon cooked while, outside, laundry fluttered on the balcony above a patchy brown yard.

“Everybody here is very friendly,” Leon said in Spanish. She stirred a pot of sopa de mondongo, a vegetable soup, on her stovetop as the family’s white dog, Fluffy, watched.

The Venezuelan family has lived here for two months, she explained, squeezing in with a cousin and another friend. In that time, the complex — along with three others managed by the same company — has drawn national attention over allegations that it was overtaken by a transnational Venezuelan gang. In those months, the family has also dealt with the same problems, like pest infestations and piled-up trash outside, that other residents of CBZ Management’s Colorado properties have complained about for years.

Still, Leon said, it was better than when the family lived in their car. And they hoped to stay — even as they found themselves caught in the middle of the runaway story about gang takeover claims that fueled sensational headlines and influenced a presidential election that could determine the future for millions of immigrants like them.

Since August, CBZ’s representatives have engaged in a public campaign to blame its problems on recent gang activity, including asserting that it caused them to flee the properties. But interviews, documents and other reporting by The Denver Post reveal a more complicated collapse in which gangs were the latest in a long line of crises.

Since at least 2020, tenants in CBZ’s properties in Denver and Aurora have intermittently lived with broken heating systems, seeping sewage water, broken doors, cockroach infestations and black mold so severe that one housing advocate said his hand sank into it. Lawsuits, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and, now, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the Colorado attorney general have followed a company that officials in two cities have been unable to bring into compliance.

Gang members have followed, too.

They’ve threatened tenants, beat one of CBZ’s representatives and engaged in shootouts near the properties, amid a year of documented criminal activity.

This story draws on interviews with two dozen current and former tenants, lawyers, housing advocates, legislators and Aurora officials, as well as hundreds of pages of inspection reports, tenant complaints, internal emails, legal filings and other public records obtained by The Post. The material portrays a company that chronically refused to fix unsafe housing conditions across its seven properties in Denver and Aurora, while officials in those cities offered plea deals and licensure to the landlord, even as its practices continued unabated.

The problems culminated in the presence of gang members on some of the properties, the displacement of dozens of vulnerable tenants and the release of a now-infamous video of armed men in a hallway at CBZ’s Edge of Lowry apartments. That viral video helped bring former President Donald Trump to Aurora for a campaign rally on Oct. 11.

Last year, an Aurora Police assessment suggested CBZ Management could address criminal activity at one of its properties by investing in lighting and door security. Now, Aurora officials allege, CBZ is seizing on the gang reports to absolve itself of blame for the unsound conditions it consistently ignored.

“It appears to me, based upon all the information that I have, that the management company is using this story — or the exaggeration of this story — to say, ‘Hey, we’re stepping away from a place that we mismanaged basically into ruin,’ ” Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain, who started the job in late August, told The Post.

Chamberlain said police believe there are between 10 and 20 suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang active in Aurora, out of roughly 1,100 members of various gangs identified in the city. At least nine Tren de Aragua members have been arrested, and a multi-agency task force is investigating the gang’s presence.

“We did have a problem. But we responded to the problem, and still are,” Mayor Mike Coffman said in an interview Tuesday, shortly after meeting with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to discuss the law enforcement response.

CBZ denies claims as AG investigates

The people associated with CBZ first entered the Colorado housing market in 2017, when a company controlled by Shmaryahu Baumgarten purchased the Emerald Towers in Colorado Springs, expanding the company beyond the several buildings it owned in Brooklyn, New York.

Between 2019 and early 2022, Baumgarten and CBZ-connected entities bought four properties in Aurora, three in Denver, two in Edgewater and another in Pueblo. Public records, including loan filings and statements of authority, indicate that Baumgarten owns CBZ’s properties through limited liability companies that were initially registered to his New York address.

CBZ Management’s local representative, Zev Baumgarten, bought a house in Lone Tree in early 2022 and is listed on other corporate filings for CBZ’s subcompanies.

After seven years in business in Colorado, the company’s presence is faltering. One of its Aurora properties was ordered closed by the city in August. Control of two more, including Whispering Pines, has been given to a caretaker at a creditor’s request in a receivership action brought after loans signed by Shmaryahu Baumgarten went unpaid. Another creditor has reached out to the city about the fate of the company’s final Aurora property.

Early last month, the city of Denver issued a criminal summons against the company and placed a lien against its 1644 Pennsylvania St. building in the Uptown neighborhood. The CBZ-controlled entity that owns the property owed more than $59,000 in unpaid fines as of Wednesday, the city said.

And in September, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office issued investigative subpoenas to CBZ and several subsidiary companies as well as to Zev Baumgarten, according to records obtained by The Post. The documents indicate the office is investigating whether the company violated consumer protection and safe-housing laws, in part through a law changed by legislators in May.

Shmaryahu and Zev Baumgarten, along with their attorney, did not return an interview request sent last week, and previous attempts to reach Zev Baumgarten were unsuccessful. Their attorney also did not return a phone call seeking comment Thursday.

A separate attorney for the company told The Post in September that his clients “deny any claim suggesting that they operated the apartments in uninhabitable conditions” and blamed the problems at their properties on “government failures.”

“We got used to the place”

Whispering Pines, located a few blocks from the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, at East 13th Avenue and Helena Street, is made up of three buildings formed into a U-shape. Between them is a patchy brown lawn with a playground and a slide.

Felipa López Chén moved out of the two-bedroom apartment she shared with her father, her husband and their three children in late October. The conditions were difficult: Though she paid a maintenance fee, nobody addressed the bed bugs or cockroaches that scuttle around the buildings.

And then safety problems began to mount. Though nobody bothered her when she first moved in last December, she said, later some neighbors threatened her. One man fired a gun from the apartment above. She said some of her neighbors threatened to kill her and her children.

Chén, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala for better work opportunities, also contended with a lease delay and demands for money from the building manager, she said. She isn’t used to her new place yet, she said, since her job and child’s school are farther away.

“We would return there because it is close to us,” Chén said. “The truth is, we got used to the place. But unfortunately, we had to move away for our own good.”

The upheaval at Whispering Pines, including the recent presence of a new property manager hired by the court-appointed receiver, has heaped new unknowns upon Leon and Ledezma’s family. There are some improvements, as crews have come to clean garbage in the streets and to address electrical and plumbing issues.

The police recently stopped by to check on them and ask if the family planned to stay. They do, Leon said, but their rent is about to increase to $2,500 a month. She doesn’t understand how it could cost so much. At the junkyard, she said, her husband “barely earns $500 a week.”

After Ledezma took the children to school, the smell of spices filled Leon’s apartment as she stirred her soup. Spanish music echoed in the street outside. She said allegations by CBZ and others that gangs ran the property were “a lie.” Her children still play outside, she said, and her neighbors are good people. One family this fall organized a baby shower with a sheet cake.

And as Trump painted an apocalyptic image of the city at his rally, tenants at Whispering Pines gathered for a barbecue.

A stay-at-home mom, Leon is now trying to find work to help keep the family afloat.

“I ask God every day,” she said, “every moment, every morning, to work.”

“They have broken far too many promises”

CBZ has contended publicly that when it bought its buildings in metro Denver, it had a long-term plan to improve them. But in Denver and Aurora, tenant complaints mounted and investigations by health inspectors began soon after the company took over.

In a September story, former tenants told The Post about extensive problems they experienced in CBZ-owned buildings. Dozens of complaints and subsequent health inspections were strikingly similar across the company’s properties in Denver and Aurora: black mold, pest infestations, unsound infrastructure. Appliances didn’t work, windows were broken, and poor security allowed nonresidents to sleep and use drugs in common spaces and vacant areas.

CBZ benefited from the two cities’ approaches to housing inspections that emphasized collaboration to achieve compliance, particularly as both sought to preserve their housing stock amid a shortage in the market, records and interviews show.

In Denver, city officials issued a landlord license to CBZ’s three apartment complexes there in 2023 as it implemented a new licensing program. All three had passed a third-party inspection, conducted by the same private inspector on the same day, in January 2023, according to copies of the reports provided to The Post.

Just one issue was flagged at any of the properties: an expired fire extinguisher. Several weeks earlier, a city health inspector had found cockroaches and a mold-like substance at one property. And another city inspection a month later, at 1644 Pennsylvania, found rodent droppings and holes in the walls.

In Aurora, the city leveled several criminal court summonses against Zev Baumgarten between 2022 and 2024 because of the properties’ dilapidated conditions and CBZ’s refusal to fix them, records show. At least twice, the city reached plea agreements with Baumgarten to resolve those cases, with requirements to keep the properties up to code for at least a year.

That did not happen, inspection reports show.

Aurora city spokesman Ryan Luby, in a statement, acknowledged those plea deals and said the city wanted to incentivize CBZ to act. Code enforcement processes, he wrote, were “designed to be educational and informative, not punitive.”

“With the benefit of hindsight,” he continued, “we recognize the stall tactics CBZ, its principals and their various attorneys have used in court over the last several years. … They have broken far too many promises to remedy the substantial issues we have continually found at their properties. Unfortunately, we have been at the mercy of the judicial process, as frustrating as it can be.”

Coffman, the mayor, said the city may need to reexamine its inspection processes, including a rejected landlord licensure program he spoke out against last year. Aurora had never dealt with a property owner like CBZ before, he said.

Now, he said, “I certainly know — and I’m sure (other city officials) know — that they never had any intention of maintaining their properties.”

Violence at the Edge of Lowry

Jo Buckley previously told The Post about the single day she spent living in Aurora’s Edge of Lowry apartments in August 2020. She moved out immediately when she realized the unit had no heat and water seeped through the bathroom floor, she said.

The Edge of Lowry would become infamous almost exactly four years later, when another tenant captured a video of several armed men outside her door.

Made up of six squat brick buildings separated by grassy courtyards on Dallas Street, the Edge of Lowry is a short walk south of East Colfax Avenue. On a fall day last month, the complex was silent, save for a 24-hour automated surveillance post that intermittently announced that the area was being watched.

Cindy Romero’s camera captured the armed men, including one holding a rifle and four carrying handguns, entering a neighboring apartment. She said she was happy during her more than four years living in the building with her husband; it was what she’d expected from a “low-income property.”

It was noisy. There was some trash. Dogs were sometimes off-leash outside.

But it was cheap enough that she could catch up on bills, she said, and her apartment was nice. She had none of the problems described by other CBZ tenants, though she said homeless people slept and used drugs in the stairwells.

“I was really happy there,” Romero said.

But she said her building was later overtaken by gangs, and after providing her video to a Denver media outlet, she moved out with the help of Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky. She now lives in one of CBZ’s other Colorado properties.

“The community was great,” she said. “I’m really, really sad to have had to leave.”

Together with her partner and their young daughter, Ayleen Medina has lived in an apartment at the Edge of Lowry for the past year. She traveled to the U.S. from Colombia last year, and a friend who’d lived at the apartments helped her apply online, she said.

Medina, 24, paid her $1,100 rent regularly — until several months ago, when the landlord’s office suddenly closed.

There has been crime here, she said while sitting at the bottom of her building’s staircase, but she didn’t think any of it was gang-related. In the late summer, she said, several men came to the complex.

They were strangers, she said, looking for Venezuelans. There was a shooting outside afterward.

After that, residents and children stopped playing outside.

Medina said the stories of violent crime and gang activity in the area had harmed residents. Housing advocates, too, have told The Post that CBZ tenants now struggle to find new homes because other landlords assume they’re all gang members.

And because of what a few criminals did, Medina said of property managers, “now they want to get us all out of here.”

How some migrants ended up in buildings

Despite the years of documented unsafe conditions in CBZ’s buildings, two small nonprofit groups used grant funding from a state agency to help newly arrived migrants secure housing in the Aurora properties last year.

That practice was confirmed to The Post by four advocates who have worked with CBZ’s tenants: Emily Goodman and Nadeen Ibrahim of the East Colfax Community Collective; V Reeves of Housekeys Action Network Denver; and Jennifer Piper of American Friends Service Committee. The extent of the practice is unknown, though they said it was not systematic. They estimated that 10% to 25% of CBZ’s Aurora tenants received support from the groups.

Papagayo, one of the nonprofits, did not return emails seeking comment for this story, though a January email from an Aurora police administrator said the group “places people in these buildings.”

Yoli Casas, the executive director of the other nonprofit, Vive Wellness, initially told The Post that migrants “probably” were housed in CBZ’s properties using grant dollars. She said migrants would find housing themselves, and Vive would provide financial support and check the properties’ condition.

After she said she would check whether CBZ or its constituent companies received money, she stopped returning messages.

Much of the money that went to Vive and Papagayo came from contracts provided by the state. Micki Trost, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which distributed the contracts, said a Post request for a list of included properties would cost $26,352.69. Since the state does not have a list of the properties, she said, determining who received money would require reviewing thousands of documents and significant staff time.

Trost also indicated that the state was not tracking the condition of the properties that received funding, and the nonprofits were responsible for determining “individual properties and placements.”

The city of Denver also provided grant dollars to Vive and Papagayo to help house migrants. In response to a Post records request, Denver officials redacted the names and addresses of properties involved in the program and said the redactions were made for “safety and privacy” reasons.

Jon Ewing, a spokesman for Denver Human Services, said none of CBZ’s properties or related companies received money as part of the city’s Denver Asylum Seeker Program, or DASP. But it was possible that migrants who received security deposit and rental support through the nonprofits did move into properties prior to DASP’s launch this year.

Ewing defended Papagayo and Vive’s work in getting migrants housed at a time when the city was struggling to keep up with a massive daily influx of migrants in late 2023 and early 2024. Late last year, hundreds of people, including children, slept in tents in a makeshift encampment near Zuni Street and Speer Boulevard.

“I honest to God believe that people would have died if not for (Vive’s and Papagayo’s) actions,” Ewing said. “People were choosing where they wanted to live. They were choosing where they wanted to go. They couldn’t know a political firestorm was coming.”

Still, Reeves, of Housekeys Action Network Denver, criticized the lack of oversight: “If you intend to put people into these units that have less barriers and are available, you need to make sure, on the other hand, that you have strong code enforcement and strong housing policies so you’re holding these landlords accountable.”

Gang activity adds to problems

In early August, Aurora sought to bring accountability to CBZ and its apartment building at 1568 Nome St., just west of the CU Anschutz campus. The city ordered the property closed, displacing the residents of its 99 units after repeated failures by CBZ to resolve longstanding problems there.

Nearly a year before, the city’s then-police chief, Art Acevedo, issued a criminal nuisance order against the property, citing more than three pages of recent 911 calls, on top of an extensive record of unsafe conditions. Members of the City Council, including Coffman, had toured the site earlier that year and described the conditions as “horrific” and “outrageous.”

Amid those problems, in September 2023, police began to raise concerns about a Venezuelan gang in the area, according to internal department emails leaked late last month. City officials have said those emails described “speculation and concern among some of our officers” that Tren de Aragua was active in the city.

In October 2023, an Aurora police officer who specialized in environmental security visited Nome Street. The officer wrote in a report that “gangs in the area have moved into the apartments and use threats and coercion to control the apartments.” He said the gangs had extorted immigrants at Nome Street in a bid to prevent them from talking to police — and that police cars had been rammed by fleeing vehicles.

According to additional police records, gang members in some instances intimidated and attacked residents at all three of CBZ’s Aurora properties.

But the Aurora officer also indicated that conditions at the Nome Street property had invited criminal activity. He offered “numerous” but “fairly easy to accomplish” recommendations for CBZ to improve security, including improved lighting and on-site property management.

That report was sent to CBZ’s attorney a year ago, and Zev Baumgarten was present for at least some of the assessment, police spokesman Joe Moylan said.

But the recommendations were not followed, and the property continued to deteriorate.

Zev Baumgarten was beaten by a gang member in November 2023, but Moylan said he didn’t want to press charges until early July. The man accused of beating him was arrested in late summer and was in court Oct. 25.

In May, two of Zev Baumgarten’s attorneys told Coffman that there was significant crime around the Nome Street property, according to a letter obtained through a records request. But they wrote that their clients didn’t blame police for it and that recent crimes had not been committed by tenants.

A month later, one of CBZ’s lawyers, Walter Slatkin, began writing to state and local officials, alleging that his clients had learned on June 27 that their properties had been “forcibly taken over” by “individuals claiming to be part of one or more gangs.”

In July, a law firm hired by a bank with a financial interest in the Whispering Pines apartments wrote an 11-page report alleging extensive gang activity there.

In early August, ahead of the city’s impending closure of 1568 Nome St., Slatkin emailed an assistant city attorney. He noted CBZ’s ongoing negotiations with the city over the complex’s future, and he reiterated the company’s claims of a gang takeover — which, Slatkin said, prevented the company from being on site.

Peter Schulte, an assistant city attorney, reminded Slatkin that CBZ was legally required to assist its soon-to-be-displaced tenants. The company’s claims, Schulte wrote, were “not adequate to prevent your clients from meeting their responsibilities in a controlled environment.”

A public relations offensive

The company then began to make its gang claims public.

As Schulte and Slatkin exchanged emails, a Florida PR firm that CBZ hired, Red Banyan, began reaching out to reporters, including at The Post. The firm alleged in an Aug. 5 email that Tren de Aragua had “taken over several communities in the Denver area” and said CBZ “needed immediate political and public pressure to address this crisis.”

The PR firm also reached out to Jurinsky, the Aurora councilwoman, alleging that gangs had taken over and were collecting rent. The firm said it would connect Jurinsky with Shmaryahu Baumgarten and with reporters, based on her “comfort level.”

Jurinsky and Baumgarten later forwarded emails to each other, records show, and she participated in negotiations between the city and CBZ. She has since become a public supporter of the company’s allegations and criticisms of Aurora police, adding to a history of tangling with police officials. She did not return recent interview requests from The Post.

In early September, CBZ rejected an offer to have uniformed officers stationed at its properties from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week; Coffman said the company instead requested a 24-hour police presence.

As Nome Street headed for closure, Coffman, too, went on Fox News and reiterated the claims that the apartments had been taken over and that gangs were collecting rent. But last week, he told The Post that he later learned that neither of those claims were true. He said he received that information from a police briefing in early August and interpreted speculation as fact.

Rent was not collected by gangs, said Chamberlain, the current police chief, last week. Tenants told police that some people would bang on their doors and wouldn’t leave until the occupant gave them $20, he said. Police also investigated a report of human trafficking; when they interviewed the alleged victim, she denied the claims, Chamberlain said.

Another viral claim — that gang members threw boiling hot water on a pregnant woman — was also not true, the chief said: The woman’s nephew was hit with hot water by a group of men in February, and some splashed on her. Neither the woman nor her nephew were injured, she told police.

In August, a city official warned Slatkin, CBZ’s attorney, that the company was providing false information to the public, according to an email obtained by The Post. The city subsequently released years of inspection reports, photos and criminal summonses filed against CBZ properties. City leaders have contested more recent claims made publicly by CBZ’s representatives, as well as by Jurinsky.

Still, helped along by a presidential election and a right-wing media ecosystem focused on immigration, the story has continued to spiral. At his rally, Trump was flanked by mugshots of gang members arrested by Aurora police as he falsely claimed the entire city had been “conquered.”

“I’m not saying, as chief of police, there is not crime in these complexes,” Chamberlain said last week. “I’m not saying … people aren’t being victimized, because (they) are. But what I am saying, also, is that the place is not taken over.

“And what I’m also saying is that a lot of the information that’s coming out — it is a false narrative. It’s a false narrative that’s not based on facts. It’s not based on data, it’s not based on statistics. It’s based on anecdotal, third-party stories that somehow circulate and go around and around in circles.”

Staff writer Sam Tabachnik contributed to this story.