I'VE BEEN COVERING tenant issues for 20 years now, and I've seen an awful lot of truly awful landlords. But I've never run across anyone quite like Richard E. Thomas.

As A.C. Thompson and George Schulz report on page 16, Thomas has got to be the king of landlord litigation. He's been involved, by one court's count, in about 300 lawsuits. He sues his tenants, his employees, and his neighbors. He even sues his own attorneys (he's done it at least 14 times).

A class action suit filed in San Francisco charges that Thomas has developed a nice little practice of failing to return the security deposits of tenants who move out of his buildings – and then if the tenants try to go to small-claims court to get their money back, he turns around and sues them for thousands of dollars. The suit calls it a "scheme to wrongfully and unlawfully retain all or part of the security deposits." Since he owns some 44 buildings, most in San Francisco and the East Bay, with several hundred units total, we could be talking about a lot of money here.

So far the local authorities have been slow to respond. Tenants have complained to the Oakland City Attorney's Office and the Alameda District Attorney's Office, neither of which has pursued the security-deposit issue. Nor have their counterparts in San Francisco.

But they ought to. If the class action allegations are true, then this is a serious scam, costing a lot of people money they can ill afford to lose.

In other news: Mayor Gavin Newsom, the young, hip political star whose (embarrassing) pictures from the Getty mansion are in Harper's Bazaar, is starting to act like that old-school pol who was his predecessor in Room 200. The move that shifted Annemarie Conroy out of the Treasure Island Development Authority and into the Office of Emergency Services, then moved Tony Hall off the Board of Supervisors and into Treasure Island, allowing Newsom to appoint Sean Elsbernd to the board, reeked of something Willie Brown would have done. So did the appointment of Susan Leal to head the Public Utilities Commission. As we point out in a editorial on page 11, Conroy, Hall, and Leal are all going to important jobs that they're completely unqualified for – just so Newsom can have another ally on the board. Willie must be smiling.

Tim Redmond