A-Rod The Slumlord

Sorry, A-Rod the “landlord caricature”:

Past a psychic’s storefront and coin laundry on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Tampa, Fla., a sign reading “We [heart] Our Residents” is planted beside manicured shrubs and an iron gate with a fresh coat at the entrance of Newport Riverside apartments.

The paint is camouflage for the mottled backside of the complex, where an exhausted appliance sits on a porch, cardboard is taped over broken window panes and missing spindles give rickety banisters the look of a snaggletooth smile.

Some residents here tell tales of roaches overtaking kitchen cabinets in a bumper-to-bumper crawl to the corn flakes, of carpets stained in the 1990s and quick-trigger evictions.

“My mom comes here and she ain’t no rich person, but she thinks I live in the projects,” said Miguel Ruiz as he sat on the second-floor landing of Building 2-A on a recent Sunday afternoon. “She’s scared to come over here, for real.”

As Ruiz spoke, he pulled a boy named Elijah from a gap in the railing that opened when yet another piece of the banister rattled loose and fell to the ground.

“See, stuff like that, with kids around, it’s messed up here,” Ruiz said, adding, “Honestly, I was raised in a ghetto and I was brought up a little better than this.”

This is one of six apartment complexes in the Tampa area, and one of at least 16 nationwide, that Rodriguez owns and operates as the chief executive of Newport Property Ventures.

An examination of his high-rolling corporate side, as well as a glossy A-Rod Family Foundation short on largess, reveals a portrait of Rodriguez as a player about to enter Yankee Take II solely for business purposes, primarily as a branding tool. He emerges as an obsessive pursuer of cold, hard numbers on and off the bases, with serially disingenuous nods to his ever-challenged image.

A-Rod isn’t exactly a slumlord — some renters interviewed at his other properties had milder complaints — but he has become a landlord caricature among dwellers who hold him accountable for, say, the stack of molding mattresses by the dumpster at Newport Villas on MacDill Avenue.