The law finally caught up with notorious Philadelphia landlord Phil Pulley ... but for voting fraud

Philip C. Pulley has been cutting corners, ignoring the rules, and dodging lawsuits for years, as evidenced by an ever-growing mountain of unpaid tax and utility bills, building code violations, and complaints from tenants, ex-employees, and contractors.

The 62-year-old landlord, who splits time between mansions in Montgomery County and Florida, has developed a reputation as one of Philadelphia’s most notorious property owners.

He made headlines in 2022 after the Lindley Tower apartments in North Philly partially collapsed, displacing about 100 residents. And recent lawsuits accuse Pulley and his affiliated companies of everything from managing rat-infested apartment buildings and retaliating against tenants who complain, to stiffing contractors and even tanking a Police Athletic League plan to build a new recreation center for children.

In April, living conditions at one of his apartment complexes got so bad that residents rallied outside City Hall with a large sign that read, “Philip Pulley Slumlord Bully.”

“Stone cold negligence,” is how Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, who joined the protesters, describes Pulley’s behavior.

“Deplorable conduct,” the state Attorney General’s Office wrote in a consumer-protection suit filed last year against Pulley and his companies, including his main property management company, SBG Management.

The law finally caught up with the landlord this summer — yet it had nothing to do with real estate. In a rare and brazen case of alleged election fraud, Pulley has been charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office with double voting in the 2020 and 2022 federal elections.

Prosecutors say he registered to vote in Philadelphia with a phony Social Security number while already being registered to vote at his mansion in Huntingdon Valley and at his waterfront house in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

Voting records recently reviewed by The Inquirer show that Pulley — a former longtime Republican now registered as a Democrat — appears to have doubled voted in the 2021 and 2023 elections, as well, casting votes in both Philadelphia and Montgomery County simultaneously. It is unclear whether he could face additional state charges for those apparent votes.

The state consumer case and the federal criminal case come amid signs of financial strain. In recent years, Pulley has sought to off-load assets, such as his personal yacht, and sued his insurers over denied claims, including costs linked to the 2022 Lindley collapse. City Hall is now moving to demolish the empty, seven-story tower and charge Pulley’s companies with the teardown bill.

While the election fraud charges briefly put the landlord into the national news cycle, an Inquirer investigation shows that he has long acted with impunity, often with few consequences.

Eleven Philadelphia apartment buildings managed by Pulley’s company, SBG Management Services, were linked to nearly 1,000 building code violations, according to city records. City lawyers also went to court over SBG’s buildings more than 300 times between 2014 and 2024, either over maintenance issues or filing liens for unpaid utilities and delinquent taxes totaling more than $2.5 million.

And even when Pulley or his companies lose in court, he doesn’t always pay up, court records show.

In August 2022, for example, city lawyers secured a default judgment in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court for $342,809 after Pulley failed to respond to a lawsuit alleging that he owed seven years’ worth of business income and wage taxes. He took out the wage taxes from his employees’ paychecks, the suit claims, but didn’t turn over the money to the city.

Two years after that court judgment, Pulley has yet to comply, a city official recently said.

“The city is aware of and is monitoring delinquencies for properties owned by Pulley and SBG Management,” said Ava Schwemler, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department. “The city is evaluating its options at this time to ensure collection of any outstanding delinquencies.”

Pulley operates behind a network of business entities — generally a different company for each apartment site — making it difficult to hold him personally accountable.

Although some of these companies are registered to Pulley’s home, parties trying to sue Pulley can sometimes find it nearly impossible to locate Pulley or his business associates to serve them with legal papers.

For instance, a construction company filed a suit in March against SBG for failure to pay $116,000 for work done at Lindley Tower. The case has so far been unable to proceed. No one can get the lawsuit into the hands of Pulley or his attorney, despite repeated efforts.

“We’ve been unable to find the defendant,” said Edward Seglias, the construction company’s lawyer.

Pulley declined to be interviewed for this article.

In a 2018 Inquirer article that found that at least half of SBG’s properties did not have active rental licenses, Pulley claimed that he’s the victim of unruly tenants who destroy property, then call the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) in a ploy to avoid paying rent.

“I’m the lightning bolt. Everybody hates Phil Pulley,” he lamented at the time. “I’ve got people yelling at me, but the fact is, I rent to people convicted of felonies. … I rent to people with terrible credit. I think there’s a major problem in the city and there has to be better dialogue between everyone to fix this system. The system is broken.”

In a statement to The Inquirer, Pulley’s lawyer, Michael Yanoff, said that SBG managed properties provide a badly needed form of affordable housing “for many residents who are unable to obtain suitable housing elsewhere.”

Yanoff downplayed the severity of building code violations, and noted that Pulley is not the legal owner of the apartment complexes.

“Mr. Pulley does not own any of the properties,” the lawyer wrote.

Pulley has lived in Huntingdon Valley since the 1980s, and since 2000 in a gated estate called Stonewall Manor.

In 2005, the Pulley family also closed on a $1.7 million mansion in Lighthouse Point, Fla., according to Broward County deed records. The 5,300-square-foot property overlooks an inlet and quay ample enough to accommodate Pulley’s 70-foot liveaboard yacht. It’s named Raiders, after a youth hockey team Pulley once coached at one of two suburban hockey rinks he purchased in the 2000s.

Back in Philadelphia, however, when SBG’s apartment buildings required repairs, Pulley has looked to cut costs at every opportunity, ex-employees and tenants say.

“The bare minimum,” said Abraham Roberts, 30, who worked for SBG and lived in one of its buildings. “He didn’t really care at all about his tenants, any of them.”

Tenants have repeatedly complained about heat and hot water outages; leaks; broken stoves, doors and locks; rodent and cockroach infestations; and raw sewage seeping up through bathtubs.

“While I’d be sitting on the toilet, someone else’s bathroom would be leaking on my head,” said Atia Pitts, 40, who has lived in two SBG buildings. “I lived with mice and rats every day, every night. Slept with the lights on all year.”

Earlier this year, when an elevator at the Oak Lane Court apartment building stopped working, workers showed up and rather than fixing it, sealed off the elevator doors with drywall, said tenant Juanita Clark, 42, who recalled seeing elderly neighbors struggling to carry bags up several flights of stairs.

“They put up a wall like it was never there,” Clark said. “I couldn’t believe it. It was like the elevator never existed.”

Kyreim Carter, 54, lived at Pulley’s Lindley Tower until the building partially collapsed in September 2022. She was relocated to another Pulley apartment building.

“Then there were problems there, too,” said Carter, including ceilings that leaked and periods of no heat. “He just didn’t care. He’s horrible.”

The state Attorney General’s Office’s complaint against SBG and other Pulley companies alleges a “yearslong, systemic failure” to maintain the buildings. It says SBG charged some tenants $5,000 in retaliatory legal fees after they complained to the state. That case is ongoing.

Shawn Stokes, 36, a former longtime maintenance worker for SBG, said Pulley’s strategy was to maximize profits and minimize expenses, ordering employees to salvage parts from other buildings rather than buy anything new.

“We were robbing Peter to pay Paul, to the point there was nothing else Peter could give us,” Stokes said.

Stokes said Pulley would seek to illegally evict people who complained, turning off their water and electricity to force them out.

Several Oak Lane tenants who have demanded better living conditions said SBG staff recently posted a flier around the building with those tenants’ personal phone numbers listed. The flier falsely instructed other tenants to call them for rent assistance.

“He goes above and beyond to get his way,” Stokes said. “He does almost anything.”

» READ MORE: Landlord in Mount Airy and North Philly fined tenants $5,000 for complaining about sewage and infestations, AG’s suit says

O’Rourke, the Council member who has sided with tenants in their dispute with Pulley, said city officials need to take more aggressive action.

“This is inhumane,” he said. “The term may be a bit passé, but that’s slumlord activity. We ought to not have it in our city.”

In a 2022 interview with the Chestnut Hill Local, Pulley said he did care about his tenants. The newspaper reported that he was raising rents by $350 a month or more at two then-unlicensed apartment buildings, despite recurring problems with leaks, mice, and no hot water. He blamed the economy.

“I don’t like having rental increases, and if the government would do something about [inflation] we wouldn’t have this problem,” Pulley said. “My heart bleeds for them, but everything costs more today.”

In the 1990s, Pulley was a vice president at Pace-Martin, a suburban strip mall developer, where he helped manage its related construction arm. He and a business associate were hit in 1996 with a lawsuit from former partners who alleged that the pair conspired to overbill for the costs of constructing a Quakertown strip mall.

The suit states they rigged construction bids, then used substandard materials and slapdash work to cut expenses while tacking on $600,000 in supposed cost overruns.

In addition to Pulley’s legal troubles in the federal election fraud case, there are signs of tough times ahead for his rental operation.

At Lindley Tower, the city obtained a $927,000 default judgment against Pulley, related to critical violations there. Then, a judge granted the city a demolition order after SBG failed for two years to make needed repairs following the 2022 partial collapse.

Schwemler, the city Law Department spokesperson, said the city “expects to initiate the demolition in the near future” at Lindley Tower. Pulley is appealing.

After the collapse, SBG filed a claim for damage, but the insurance company denied it after its investigators determined that SBG neglected to maintain the complex. In August, Pulley’s company sued the insurer in an effort to force them to pay.

City records show that the apartment complex amassed 199 violations between 2007 and 2022, and was flagged by city building inspectors seven different times as a major safety hazard before and after the collapse.

Eight miles away, at 48th and Locust Streets in West Philadelphia, two other SBG properties, Dorsett Court and Admiral Court, remain vacant and in disrepair six years after the eviction of all residents to make way for what Pulley said at the time was the sale of the properties.

On a recent visit, ivy snaked its way into the buildings through broken windows. Violations from 2019 and 2020 are still posted on windows, along with signs saying the fire system is off-line. The buildings were never sold, according to city property records.

Councilmember Rue Landau, who this year introduced the city’s new Consumer Protection Ordinance on behalf of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration, said rental practices such as Pulley’s should not be allowed to go unchecked for years.

The ordinance, which Parker signed into law in June, allows the city to act more quickly to address unfair trade practices, rather than waiting for the state to take action, Landau said.

“I’ve seen the harms of these actions over and over again,” Landau said. “Whether it’s housing or people falling for a scam, it spirals people further into poverty or into poverty for the first time. It can happen quickly.”

In the voting fraud case, Pulley was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office through what is known as a criminal information, rather than an indictment. That is typically a sign that a defendant may already have agreed to plead guilty. For each of the five counts, Pulley faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison, and a $10,000 to $250,000 fine.

Pulley even had his luck run out in the U.S. Supreme Court this year.

In a unanimous opinion delivered in February, the court held that Pulley’s insurance company was not responsible for $300,000 in damage from when the landlord’s yacht ran aground near Fort Lauderdale because Pulley had failed to maintain its fire suppression system. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion.

The yacht, which features a “huge” stateroom with shower and bathtub, wood flooring and stainless steel appliances, has been listed for sale on the Denison yacht sales website. The most recent asking price was $499,000, but the site now says it is “off market.”

Staff writers Chris A. Williams, Michaelle Bond, and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.