While an absentee landlord was in Hollywood performing movie and TV voice-overs, one of his Lawrence apartment complexes turned into a haven for crack cocaine dealing.

“I don’t pay much attention to any of those properties in Lawrence because I don’t rely on them for income,” said landlord Thomas L. Roberts, 41, who, among other roles, supplies the voice of Yoda in Star Wars video games and Professor Utonium in the “Powerpuff Girls” television cartoon series.

A long way from Roberts’ home in Agoura, Calif., is Lawrence’s Pine Haven Court, an enclave of town homes off Haskell Avenue that in recent months has been buzzing with drug activity and other nuisances. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, undercover Lawrence police officers bought crack cocaine three times in February at the Pine Haven residence of 28-year-old Jeremiah Davis, who since has pleaded guilty to federal drug and firearms charges.

From January 2002 until this month, Lawrence police responded to the 12-unit complex 170 times for parking problems, disturbances and other issues, said Sgt. Mike Pattrick, a spokesman for the police department.

Earlier this year, the Hollywood landlord began an effort to collect on unpaid rent at Pine Haven, and today the complex, off the 2100 block of Haskell, sits empty. Jeanne Johnson, manager of the neighboring Pine Tree Townhouses Inc., said people in her complex were happy about the attention finally given Pine Haven.

“It has made things much quieter here,” she said.

‘We didn’t know’

Roberts, also known by his Hollywood name of Tom Kane, is a sought-after performer with his own studio and agent. He graduated from Kansas University in 1984 and since then, people everywhere have heard his voice, he said.

Asked to provide a sample of his work, he deepened his voice and said, in authentic movie-trailer tones, “Walt Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Starts Friday at theaters everywhere. Rated ‘G.'”

Paul Fisher, who was hired to clean out things left behind by past tenants at the town homes in Pine Haven Court, is pictured in one of the units. The rental properties were a nuisance to Lawrence Police, who responded to parking problems, disturbances and other issues at the complex 170 times between January 2002 and this month.

When Roberts and his wife, Cynthia, bought Pine Haven in 1998, they entrusted Roberts’ sister, Kansas City-area resident Heather S. White, with its management, Roberts said.

This spring, Roberts sent his wife to Kansas to meet with White and find out why the property and others they own in Lawrence were “hemorrhaging” money, he said.

“We didn’t know that we were slumlords,” he said. “We didn’t know we had the local crack den, or whatever it was.”

Roberts said that when his wife drove past the townhomes, she saw “what looked like a slum — just trash everywhere, broken windows and people just milling around that didn’t live there.”

That day, Roberts said, he fired his sister and turned management of the units over to M & M Rentals, 1800 E. 23rd St. Still, he said he didn’t know the extent of the problems at the town homes until the new property manager had a conversation with police in the parking lot who told her they were staking out the area.

Sheriff Rick Trapp, whose deputies work on the joint city-county Drug Enforcement Unit, said that in general it would be unusual for officers to disclose a drug investigation that way.

Townhomes decay

¢ 6News video: Absentee landlord cleans up his act

White, Roberts’ sister, couldn’t be reached for comment, and Roberts declined to disclose her telephone number. He said his sister wasn’t a bad person — just a “softie” who was stretched thin trying to manage Lawrence properties while living in Johnson County.

He said that when he bought the town homes he “dumped a staggering amount of money” into them, remodeling and filling them with new appliances. He plans to send his children to KU, and he thinks about retiring here.

“It was never my intention to be an absentee landlord,” he said.

The city’s code-enforcement manager, Barry Walthall, said he didn’t have any statistics on the number of absentee landlords in Lawrence.

“My sense would be that there are quite a few,” he said. “They’re just a little more difficult to get a hold of, is probably the biggest problem.”

Problems with Pine Haven began about a year and a half ago, Roberts estimated — about the time the rent money stopped coming in. He said he thought his sister just wanted to fill up the town homes, regardless of who was moving in and what their background was.

Once they were in, he said, she couldn’t bring herself to evict them for unpaid rent.

“They were constantly giving her the song and dance,” he said. “Any other property manager would have heaved these people out on their butts.”

Paul Fisher, Lawrence, was hired last week to clean up what he said were some of the worst rental properties he'd ever seen. The town homes at Pine Haven Court are owned by Thomas and Cynthia Roberts, who live in California.

Bit by bit, the complex was transformed. Residents of the neighboring Pine Tree Townhouses, a subsidized-housing cooperative, complained about people taking their parking spots, climbing over their fences and banging on their doors, mistakenly thinking they were in Pine Haven.

“Half the people that lived in Pine Haven didn’t even live there,” Roberts said. “They’d filled up the spare bedrooms and basements with people who had no business being there.”

In one town house, the person who signed the lease had been gone for three months and six different people were living there, Roberts said.

“I know there were some nice people there, too,” said Johnson, manager of the neighboring complex.

Cleanup begins

With the new management in place, Roberts got tough on unpaid rent and began eviction proceedings against eight of the 12 Pine Haven tenants. He also emptied his six-unit complex at 1137 Tenn., where, he said, many friends and family members of Pine Haven residents were living.

Efforts to contact five former Pine Haven residents whose numbers were listed in court records were unsuccessful. One former resident of 1137 Tenn. who declined to be identified said she never saw drug dealing in her building.

All Pine Haven residents had moved out by June 30, although, according to a police report, they didn’t leave without taking about $5,000 in washers, dryers and other appliances.

On Thursday, the only sign of life at the complex was a three-member cleanup crew. Worker Paul Fisher, who was earning $8 an hour to haul out people’s belongings by the Dumpster-load, said he found drug paraphernalia such as needles and burnt spoons in nearly every town house.

“We couldn’t figure out why they had so much nice furniture and they couldn’t pay their bills,” he said as he stood on the front step of No. 110, holding a piece of abdominal-exercise equipment he said he was thinking about taking home.

Inside one townhouse, the wall above the range was blackened from fire. Unrecognizable pieces of food sat in the darkened refrigerator, and the carpet was covered with stains, cigarette butts and pieces of crayons.

John McKean, a maintenance worker for a neighboring row of town homes, said he never saw anything illegal happening at Pine Haven.

“I would just see tons of little kids running around all the time,” he said.

Unanswered questions

Roberts, reached by phone as he was on his way to a recording session, said he wanted to know one thing: Why didn’t police ever call him or his sister to let them know the property was a nuisance?

“As far as I know, nobody ever contacted her as the property manager and said, ‘You have an apartment building full of drug dealers,'” he said. “It would have taken one phone call a year ago, and within 72 hours these changes would have been put into place.”

Pattrick, the Lawrence Police spokesman, said he couldn’t speak in detail about Pine Haven. Sometimes, he said, police try to solve problems at a rental property by dealing with the residents, and other times they notify landlords.

“Usually what the police department does is deal with the people who are creating the problem,” he said. “There are times when we do make contact with the ownership or management. It’s on a case-by-case basis.”