Kyung Lee subleased the fluorescent-lit store on 10th Street to
roughly 25 vendors, who paid him between $1,500 and $3,000 a month
for space to sell everything from stereos to underwear. About two
months ago, Lee stopped paying rent, spurring West Valley
Properties to evict him.
Gilroy – Kyung Lee subleased the fluorescent-lit store on 10th Street to roughly 25 vendors, who paid him between $1,500 and $3,000 a month for space to sell everything from stereos to underwear. About two months ago, Lee stopped paying rent, spurring West Valley Properties to evict him.
The trouble is, Lee’s subleasers never stopped paying rent – and now, they’re paying the price for his vanishing act. Friday, when an eviction notice landed on D-Mart’s door, Lee was rumored to have fled the country, leaving a score of furious shopowners in his wake.
“We didn’t even get a 30-day notice,” complained Erasmo Cisneros, as he wheeled off cartons of unsold CDs from his shop Monday, to store at home until he finds a new venue. “He may have gotten it, but he never told us. It’s just been lies after lies.”
Shell-shocked vendors carted off racks of blouses, leaving naked mannequins in their wake. Stylists daubed dye onto one last customer’s hair, then cleared their shelves. Piñatas dropped from the ceiling, one by one, at Gil Garcia’s candy shop, a shop he’s owned for five years.
Tenants had to clear the grounds by midnight Monday, according to the county’s notice.
“I don’t know if I’ll get my $2,700 deposit back,” Garcia fretted, wheeling a dolly into his shop. He’s luckier than most: Garcia also owns Flor de Jalisco, an east Gilroy corner store. “Who’s going to pay me? How am I even going to reach the manager?”
In Los Altos, Jon Rayden is asking the same question. Rayden is president of West Valley Properties, which manages the D-Mart property. Lee owes West Valley more than $50,000 in unpaid rent, said Rayden. His manager, a “Mr. Kim” (Rayden declined to provide his full name; shopowners knew him only as “Billy”) told Rayden that Lee left the country.
“Mr. Kim certainly knew something was wrong, and he could have told them,” said Rayden, when asked why West Valley didn’t notify Lee’s subleasers of the pending eviction. “He’s the intermediary between the guy that’s supposed to pay us and all of these poor people.”
Deputy district attorney Frank Carrubba could not be reached Monday to say whether the office was investigating the apparent theft.
Even before his disappearance, Lee wasn’t around much, said shop manager Daniel Gonzalez: His last listed address, filed with the state in August 2006, is in Burbank. Gonzalez had already vacated his small square at D-Mart by Monday, loading car stereos into his garage. He spent part of the day in Los Altos, trying to persuade West Valley to stop the eviction, to no avail.
“The worst thing is, some people paid two months ahead,” he said, shaking his head. “If the vendors had known, we would have gotten together and found a solution. Or at least had more time to figure out what to do.”
West Valley will allow all vendors who haven’t had time to evacuate back in to retrieve their goods, said Rayden.
“We’ll do what we can to help them, because we feel really sorry for them,” he said. “But it wasn’t us who did this to them.”
Chipper Mexican folk music was still piping in over the aisles Monday as employees scrambled to clear their wares from the shelves. Stylist Olivia Robles, who works at Hair Dimensions, a tiny salon hidden along D-Mart’s back wall, bit her lip in anxiety.
It takes time to open a salon, she said – time that she doesn’t have.
“It all happened so fast,” Robles said in Spanish. “We haven’t even told our customers. We’re going to lose them.”
At the opposite end of the store, Joey Kim was still shilling shoes at Cinderella Zapatos, his family’s shop, fetching a medium-sized girls’ sandal for a customer. What colors does it come in? she asked.
“Estos? Rositos, blancos y beige,” – pink, white and beige, he informed the woman, between a reporter’s questions. “It’s just karma. Whoever did this – he messed up a lot of people’s lives.”
