Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Alberto Castillo shows up for our interview wearing a white-collared black-and-white pinstripe shirt, a black silk tie, and a finely woven black suit with a white pocket hankie. After we talk for a while, he tells me he was once teased for resembling a Latino soap-opera star—and being just as dramatic. Castillo’s passion is a little grimmer, though: He wants to keep violent and predatory criminals from renting next to vulnerable tenants, like single mothers with young children, or elderly people living alone. This is, in fact, his business: He and his wife, Angelica, run Landlord Shield, doing background checks far more extensive—and expensive—than the typical two-minute computer search. Just where does he think tenants with a criminal history should live? “I don’t know,” he says. “But I know where they should not live.”
Besides your business’s bottom line, what makes you care who lives where?
I grew up in Panama City. When [dictator Manuel] Noriega took control, he took my dad’s factory. For a while, it was lawless. I know how it feels to live in a place where even the police can come break down the door.
You were a teenager at the time of the Panama invasion. Did the chaos affect you that much?
It bothered me forever. The only place you can really relax is your home. How can you be afraid in your home?
How did you convince your wife to do this work?
She had a tough childhood, too. She grew up in Mexico City, and one night a gang was banging on their door screaming, “You better open the door, or we are going to rape your daughter.” She was 13. Her mom went out the back door and helped her jump the fence, so she could run next door for help. To this day, if you come to our house, you cannot knock on the door too hard.
How does St. Louis feel to you, compared to Panama City or Mexico City?
Here, you hear some gunshots blasting, but this is not a war zone. There is no excuse for that to happen. There are a lot of situations here that could have been prevented—that should have been prevented.
Are the police not working hard enough?
The police cannot go into the private sector and make them do things. The police have their hands full with the aftereffects, the actual crimes. I’m talking about prevention, and apartment-complex owners are in charge of that.
Don’t they screen prospective tenants?
There are a lot of misconceptions. People think you press a button and automatically you get all the criminal information out there. That’s not true. We take 14 to 18 hours per person. There is too much out there, and unless you know how to search—and care enough to be skeptical and cross-check anything that doesn’t look right—you are going to miss a lot.
So what do you do differently?
Search manually, cross-check information, check for slight changes of the name or date of birth. One letter can throw off the whole system. Our staff enters the name as it should be, but then enters it again with the middle name first. Every day we find people who have changed their identities. The system is only as smart as you train it to be. You need that heart to say, “How come she applied here as Coopperman with two P’s?” And then here it is, we run it with one P and boom!
What else do you look for?
Arrest records, because the court system is so overcrowded, they dismiss a substantial percentage of class A and B misdemeanors, or they amend from a felony to a misdemeanor just to move the case forward.
Where do you begin a background check?
Automatically, we do credit, criminal, and FBI terrorist-list checks. Then we start the hands-on work. We use [Missouri] Case.net
to find civil or criminal files, but we also hire staff in St. Clair and Madison counties, because there’s no Case.net database there. The key is to manually type in the information. We also run the a.k.a.s [aliases]. If you ever apply for housing, a credit card, or a cellphone, the credit bureau will track any name that you ever used under your Social Security number.
What if I’ve stolen a Social Security number?
There are fraud alerts. We verify that the number is active, belongs to that person, has not been stolen from a deceased person. It’s not simple. If you treat everything like a conveyor belt, you are going to miss critical things. You cannot tell by a credit score that that person doesn’t have a child-pornography record.
That seems pretty obvious.
You’d be surprised. Most management companies think that if you have money, you have to be a good person. A good credit score just means you never had a harsh time in your life. That doesn’t mean you are not a person we should be afraid of.
Give me a specific example.
I found this guy with a credit score of 740 and a long history of burglary, and he had just committed one prior to applying. And sex offenders—they’ve only been required to register since 1994. Are you going to tell me there were none before 1994?
So how do you find them?
That information’s going to be in the state where the person was convicted. And you know where they lived from their credit history.
Not everyone is this vigilant. Why not?
We all like technology. We think we are getting more efficient. And we also believe we can make a judgment call by how the person looks. We are wrong in both of those.
What did you do before you started doing background checks?
I used to manage nightclubs, of all things. I got tired of the nightclub life—it was no life, basically.
That’s rather a leap, from nightclubs to public safety.
I used to sit around with friends and talk about politics, social issues, and I was always too gung-ho when it came to safety. Whose responsibility is it to protect single moms? They have to work all day, leave the 13-year-old daughter taking care of the 5-year-old son. Who’s going to take care of them? It really bothered me that nobody cared.
You recently did, on your own, reverse background checks on tenants evicted by the Madison County and St. Clair County housing authorities. What did you find?
Convictions for battery, theft, obstruction of justice, escape... I gave these nice reports to the housing authorities. No response.
Why did you bother?
Unfortunately, I know that housing authorities sometimes rent to people they should not, because they want to fill apartments. And the manager says, “Well, I don’t live there, so as long as that apartment is filled, I’m OK.” But what about that little girl, her mom says to get the laundry that is in the dryer, and a child pornographer… That kills me. Who is protecting that child? My wife and I scratch our heads sometimes.
So what’s your solution—clump everybody with a significant criminal record together in segregated housing?
I’m not an expert on the justice system or on the relocation of a multiple offender. But I’m an expert on background checks. What about the people who haven’t done anything? When are we going to start worrying about them?
When you pitch your services, what do landlords say if they’re not interested?
“We are happy with what we’ve got.” They call this in the industry “calculated risk.” I’m a businessman; I’m not going to deny that of course I would like to get their business. But I also know what we find. Of every 10 applications we review, we are pretty close to finding five that either have an eviction or a criminal record.
You probably find more evictions than crimes.
No, more often criminal. And there are some significant criminal histories.
What kind of record worries you most?
Someone with a long history of predatory behavior—and it could be sexual or burglary.
“Predatory” is the deciding adjective, then.
People think predators are only sexual predators. A predator is someone who keeps perfecting that crime throughout their life. They prey. It is their business. I’m afraid of predators, because they don’t care.
Do you oversee every check yourself?
If anything looks suspicious, my wife texts me even if I’m traveling: “Alberto, when you have time, will you look at this? I don’t feel comfortable…” Sex offenders, she sends me. People with name variations. Anything violent. We’d rather answer to our clients why we took long than why we allowed it to go by.
Do you ever worry that you might make a mistake and inadvertently destroy somebody’s chances of finding a place to live?
We’re careful. We know we are liable if we put something that doesn’t belong.
Can landlords refuse to rent to anybody they don’t trust?
They have to have criteria. If they say, “I’m not going to allow people with class-A misdemeanors,” they have to be consistent.
Isn’t it kind of harsh to refuse to rent to someone if, say, they made a mistake 20 years ago, and they’ve been law-abiding ever since?
I believe in second justice. If you committed an assault or burglary when you were 17 years old and you haven’t done anything since then, you paid your dues to society. You need a second chance. But if you haven’t stopped committing crimes, I’d be the guy saying, “No, I’ve got Miss Wilson living in this building, and she’s 78 years old, and I’m not going to allow a multiple-conviction burglar with an assault history and a drug-trafficking history to live next to her.”
You also do background checks for subsidized housing, but also market-rate apartments, including $1,500-per-month apartments on Washington Avenue, where you used to live. Did you know too much about your neighbors?
We are professional about what we learn. But I was glad—as my clients got bigger and had many more tenants—to move to a house in Tower Grove.
Is it hard to find people who feel as strongly about this subject as you do?
Yes. Because unless you have ever lived in fear, you don’t know what it’s like. You cannot sleep. You cannot eat. That’s how real fear changes you. It changes the way you are to the very core, especially if it comes when you are young.
So you see yourself as the protector of St. Louis?
Somebody’s got to be.
