Several residents say that he sends her to an apartment upstairs to buy drugs for him from an illegal tenant there.

Instead of the illegal tenant getting it at an insider price, the landlord can sell the vacant apartment on the open market.

But as illegal tenants with little English and a consummate fear of deportation, they will not take their complaints to the city.

They also discovered, when the bailiffs arrived, that they were illegal tenants.

He said Harborview's management had had few specific complaints about illegal tenants.

Housing inspectors evicted illegal tenants and boarded up crack houses.

Illegal tenants and drugs, nonetheless, seem to have become deeply embedded in the culture of the Harborview senior residence.

Officials say that the illegal tenants are unwilling to report unscrupulous landlords or to seek health or social services.

But the incentive to oust an illegal tenant can be very strong when a building is about to convert from rental to cooperative or condominium.

The fear that it would be ordered to evict illegal tenants was also part of the Housing Authority's calculations this year.

This verdict is intended to legitimize the occupancy of an illegal tenant in Malacanang."

Meanwhile, residents and attendants who work in the building say illegal tenants occupy other apartments, and some of them constantly use and deal drugs.

A similar fire on Aug. 23 severely damaged another one-family home crowded with illegal tenants, a few blocks away at 37 Russell Place.

He works hard, is quick to repair the housing he overcharges his illegal tenants for, and loves his son with an intensity that is touching.

Landlords can violate basic city rules for safety and livability with impunity; illegal tenants rarely complain to the authorities because they do not want to be discovered.

Facilitators like Mr. Grabow and Ms. Reynolds got into the buyout business by clearing out illegal tenants.

Plan to Remove Illegal Tenants The Housing Authority projected last year that it had at least 93,000 unauthorized residents living doubled- and tripled-up.

There are undoubtedly many more illegal tenants who either use an old address or someone else's home address on official documents like school registration or welfare forms, he wrote.

She said that two years ago, and again a few weeks ago, one illegal tenant told her that he would kill her if she tried to get him out.

In 1995, during the difficult first year of the business, the owner-manager of the shop was an example of an illegal tenant living in the Allston Mall.

However, although few illegal tenants are sufficiently methodical or clever to avoid detection, most of them are not caught, he said, because landlords do not bother to try.

These days, the elephants' cage is becoming a public embarrassment, for it may have become an illegal tenant on the land of an Okinawan grocer who wants his property back.

"The super really did a job on this place," he said the other day, surveying the cavernous basement with a flashlight, stepping over mattresses where illegal tenants had slept a month earlier.

Lopez was among the sponsors of a bill to expand the original 1982 Loft Law, "...which gave rights to illegal tenants and made their lofts subject to rent stabilization."

The officials have said that most of the illegal tenants would not be evicted because many would have nowhere to go, given the enormous shortage of low-income housing in the city.