A management company that controlled more than 40 buildings and 3,000 units across Brooklyn and the Bronx has been caught illegally locking tenants out of their own apartments — and the pattern of who got locked out reveals exactly how these situations tend to unfold. New York Attorney General Letitia James secured a settlement against Spigro Management, LLC after finding the company changed tenants’ locks while they were out, in several cases immediately after a family death left a unit’s occupancy status unclear, according to the Attorney General’s own press release.
The Cases Behind the Settlement
The specifics are stark. One resident of more than 22 years found his locks changed after his mother died, with his possessions removed from the unit without his permission. A tenant of 45 years had his locks changed after his father’s passing, while he was actively seeking succession rights to stay in the apartment. Another occupant’s building access was deactivated after his partner died. A fourth victim, a porter employed by the building, had his locks changed after he filed a workers’ compensation claim following a workplace injury — a pattern the Attorney General’s office treated as retaliatory rather than incidental.
Why Landlords Do This Instead of Filing for Eviction
Illegal lockouts persist because they are faster and cheaper than the legal alternative. Formal eviction requires a landlord to file in court, prove cause, and wait for a judge’s order — a process that can take months and requires paying an attorney the entire way. Changing a lock while a tenant is out takes an afternoon and costs the price of a locksmith. That gap in speed and cost is exactly why illegal lockouts keep happening in buildings with sympathetic-looking circumstances: a death in the family, a tenant already the target of another dispute, a resident less likely to immediately know their legal recourse.
What the Settlement Actually Required
Under the settlement, Spigro had to pay each of the four identified victims between $1,000 and $1,200 in restitution, along with $23,500 in civil penalties. More significantly, the company was required to create a formal internal lockout policy, train employees on it, log every lock change going forward, and submit to monitoring by the Attorney General’s office for three years — oversight specifically designed to prevent the same pattern from repeating quietly in a different building the company manages.
What Tenants Can Actually Do
Tenant rights advocates note that illegal lockouts are treated seriously under New York law precisely because they let landlords sidestep due process entirely, and remedies exist even after a lock has already been changed — including emergency court applications to restore access and financial damages for any belongings removed without consent. The Spigro case is less notable for its dollar amounts, which are modest, than for what it confirms: that a large, professionally managed portfolio was willing to bypass the courts entirely when a tenant’s legal status looked the least bit ambiguous, and that regulators are actively looking for exactly that pattern.
A Death in the Family Should Not Be a Trigger
What stands out across all four documented cases is the timing. Every lockout followed a moment of genuine vulnerability — a parent’s death, a partner’s death, a workplace injury — rather than any lease violation, unpaid rent, or legal cause a landlord would normally need to justify removing someone from a unit. Succession rights, the legal mechanism that can allow a family member to remain in a rent-stabilized or rent-controlled unit after the leaseholder dies, exist precisely to prevent management companies from treating a death in the family as an opportunity to reclaim an apartment faster than the courts would otherwise allow. Spigro’s alleged conduct suggests the company treated those same moments as exactly that kind of opportunity, betting that grieving tenants would be less likely to immediately assert their legal rights.
How Common This Actually Is
The Attorney General’s release does not put a citywide number on illegal lockouts, and that absence is itself telling: enforcement in this area tends to happen case by case, triggered when a tenant knows enough to file a complaint, rather than through any systematic audit of how often landlords skip the legal eviction process entirely. Housing attorneys who handle these cases regularly say the four victims named in the Spigro settlement almost certainly represent a fraction of tenants who experienced the same treatment across the company’s 3,000-plus units, since many tenants facing a sudden lockout do not know an emergency court order can restore their access, let alone that a state attorney general’s office might ultimately take up their case.
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