Eviction movers work in an American Dream-less world. Today, it's big business.

AFTER 30 YEARS in the eviction moving business, Emanuel Rasper thought he had seen it all, but when he pulled up to Walter Rosengarth's Chester County home in 2003, he sensed something he had never felt before, something dangerous.

"It was always my habit to appear on the scene a half hour before the sheriff's deputy showed up, so I could relieve people of the anxiety of losing their stuff," said Rasper, now 91 and living in retirement along the Delaware River with Doris, his wife of 67 years.

"I always told them I would pay the first month's storage or, if they had a place to go, I'd give them a free moving job, and the landlord or the bank would pay me back," he said. "I always let them know I was the man in the white hat."

But when Rasper arrived at Rosengarth's house, the about-to-be-evicted owner "drove [his car] right up to my radiator and said, 'I'm not moving,' then barricaded himself in his house," Rasper said.

"When the sheriff's deputy showed up, I said, 'You better get reinforcements and wear flak jackets. I got an idea this guy is going to shoot.'"

Rasper was ordered to drive away a couple of blocks and wait. "By the time we turned the truck around, two shots rang out and then more shots," Rasper said. "Police cars came screaming from everywhere. I told my men, 'Let's get out of here. We're not going to be doing a job here today.'"

Convicted of wounding two sheriff's deputies, Rosengarth is serving 18 to 36 years in prison. He is also undergoing psychiatric treatment, awaiting trial in the 2002 shooting deaths of a Chadds Ford attorney and his wife, both 81.

Unlike Rasper, most eviction movers arrive after displaced homeowners are gone, pack up the remains of shattered dreams — children's toys, family photographs, holiday decorations — and drive on to the next sad address.

Like Rasper, they offer ousted families a service, paid for by the mortgage holder. The days of throwing a family's possessions out into the street are long gone. But an eviction still means the death of the American dream of home ownership.

On a beautiful spring day last week, John Mancinelli, 32 — owner of A Town Properties Inc. moving company in Aston, Delaware County— and three of his crew were in Wissinoming to clean out a three-bedroom brick rowhouse with a green, neatly-trimmed front yard on a block of well-maintained homes.

Sunlight streamed through the glass-block windows in the basement den and fell upon snapshots of a young girl all dressed up at a party and a large framed photo of a little boy hugging the same girl.

They looked like the children of the smiling couple in the wedding portrait laying face up on a nearby counter, the bride holding a bouquet of white and pink roses.

The den was filled with dozens of children's toys and books, figurines of Santa and Mrs. Claus, a white ceramic vase with three angels and the word "Hope," a framed print of Philadelphia Eagles stars including Donovan McNabb and Brian Westbrook, and a wooden heart bearing the words: "May God's Love Warm Our Home."

"From some papers I found upstairs, this looks like a young couple who took out an adjustable-rate mortgage loan," Mancinelli said. "Maybe everything was fine at $600 a month, but then it suddenly re-adjusted to $2,000 a month and they couldn't handle it."

He sighed. "This can happen to anybody," he said. "I did one in Aston where they had left behind photos of a kid in a Little League uniform. I suddenly realized the kid was my childhood friend. It was his mom's house. I had spent so much time in that house as a kid. Now, when I get one in Aston, the first thing I think of is: Is this somebody I know?"

Ankle-deep in toys, Jesse McMillan, who has done his share of cleanouts-from-hell during the 14 years he's worked for Mancinelli, smiled and said, "This is lovely, man, compared to half of them.

"People fill up the toilet with crap, fill up the bathtub, wipe it [feces] on the walls, and leave," McMillan said as his fellow movers — Frank McCartney, who has worked for A Town for 25 years, and Ross Cannady Jr., who has been there for 18 months — nodded.

"We've found 40s [40-ounce beer bottles] full of piss, all over the place," McMillan said. "One guy had a real nice Lincoln parked out front and a basement full of dog crap. We've seen dead dogs, dead cats."

The worst, McMillan said, was a live cat that had been left for days in a cage, too crazed with hunger and thirst to let anyone near it.

"I found some cat food in the house and threw it into the cage," he said. "I poured water through the top of the cage into the cat's bowl. I was thinking, 'They ought to take the people who did this out and shoot them.'"

Mancinelli said that the movers had walked into one house and found a 100-gallon fish tank filled with live African Cichlids. "The sheriff's, like, 'Somebody's got to take the fish,'" he said. "It's been three years now, I got them. They're nice fish, but they're really temperamental."

A few years ago, Mancinelli took over the family moving business from his father, who had been doing eviction cleanouts since the recession in the early 1980s.

"Right now, it's pretty consistently 25, 30 percent more than what we were doing before the recession," he said. "There are always houses out there with people defaulting. I think there's a lot more to come. I think a lot of people got in over their heads, like these people did here."

The recession that is battering homeowners is also battering the moving companies that depend on normal home sales for the bulk of their business.

Alan Jenkins, general manager of A Pioneer Moving Company, in Northeast Philadelphia, ushered a Daily News reporter into an office that looked like one of his eviction cleanouts: bare walls, two empty desks — one with a badly broken chair, the remains of two computers and, startlingly out of context, a wooden cabinet decorated with paintings of Chinese men and women in colorful silk robes.

"See what the recession does?" Jenkins said with a worried laugh. "Emptiness!"

The Chinese cabinet was salvaged from unclaimed eviction storage. This past winter, pipes burst in the vacant, unheated office next door, flooding A Pioneer's hallway and ruining the carpet. It has not been replaced.

"As soon as the recession hit the housing market, we were the ones to feel it first," Jenkins said. "Foreclosures hit us immediately. For two years now, we've seen a 50 percent decline in our regular moving business. We went from making $2.4 million in 1998 to $800,000-$900,000 the past two years.

"April to September used to mean 250 moves per month," he said. "We did 160 in 2007. We did 115 in 2008. We're doing 60-70 now. We used to have eight or nine office workers. Now, there's three. We've had no receptionist for the past two years.

"Houses aren't selling, so people aren't moving. There are more companies in the moving business and way less moves. We've had to lower prices to compete and keep our guys working. A $3,000 move is now a $1,800 move. We've made no profit for two years."

Jenkins cut costs by getting rid of the company's two tractor trailers, leaving him with his core fleet of eight moving trucks.

"We lost a lot of good workers when we went from 25 guys to 10 guys steady in the winter. That swells in the summertime, which is prime moving weather, but not like it used to swell. We lost four key drivers, who will probably never return. There just wasn't enough work here to feed their families."

When the moving business took a nose-dive, Jenkins went after eviction cleanouts, which have quickly become a staple of his business.

"If I could do an eviction cleanout every day, that would be beautiful because it is lucrative," Jenkins said. "You really don't know what you're getting into until you open the front door. But if I walk into a headache, I get paid for my headache."

The biggest headache, Jenkins said, is unclaimed storage in his two warehouses.

"In an eviction cleanout, you're not going to find an LCD or plasma TV," he said. "I never evicted anybody from a condo on Rittenhouse Square. I've never walked into an eviction and found Italian leather furniture and fine artwork on the walls. They leave junk. I become a sanitation man, not a moving man." *