Accused racist LI squatters who lost home to foreclosure claim new owners ‘intimidated’ them, trespassed by ‘camping out’ on lawn with buckets of paint
Get off my lawn!
A pair of allegedly racist squatters who went years without paying their mortgage — then refused to leave when the home was auctioned off — claim the new owners cruelly “intimidated” them, tormented them by camping out on their lawn, and threatened to paint messages on the house, court records show.
Barry and Barbara Pollack, both 72, accuse the owners of sitting on the lawn with buckets of paint after the owners agreed in January 2023 not to step foot on the Jericho property for an agreed-upon period of time, the couple claimed in legal papers.
The Pollacks made the allegations June 30 in response to a lawsuit filed against them by the Chawla family in Nassau Supreme Court seeking to recoup the more than $200,000 they spent buying the home and trying to oust the pair from the 1,536-square-foot split-level over the following 23 months.
The Chawlas allegedly “intimidated and harassed and otherwise embarrassed” the Pollacks in their home, according to their counter-claim.
The new owners “threatened to paint messages on the residence and intruded onto the premises with picnic chairs, paint and painting supplies,” the Pollacks contended. The messages were never painted, and it’s unclear what they were intended to be.
Adding insult to injury, the new owners gave a green light to neighbors to come onto the property as well to remove a fence and landscaping, the Pollacks alleged.
The Pollacks contend they offered to pay to stay in the home after it was sold at auction in February 2022, but that the Chawlas refused the money.
Barry Pollack was once caught on video telling Bobby Chawla, whose parents are from India, to “go back to Pakistan.”
The couple “are not squatters, they never were,” their current lawyer, David Witkon, insisted to The Post, noting that under the law, squatters enter a property they do not own, while the Pollacks were former owners who lost the property in foreclosure.
The Chawlas agreed in court papers “they were not to harass the occupants of the premises, yet here you are, camping out on their lawn,” he noted.
The allegations are false, insisted the Chawlas, who noted the agreement for them to stay away from the property included a date by which the Pollacks were supposed to vacate.
“We never set foot on that block until that period ended,” said Bobby Chawla. “I didn’t step on the property until after the date he was supposed to move, because I didn’t want anything to be a hiccup for him vacating. He stayed for almost a year after that.”
Chawla’s sister Gege, who was pregnant during much of the legal dispute and hoping to move into the home with her family, denied they ever sat in lawn chairs in the yard.
“He had his own feud with the neighbor, the neighbor would then sit on lawn chairs and watch what was going on,” she said of Barry Pollack. “We just want our money back and for this to be over.”
The Pollacks bought their New York house in September 1990 for $255,000, but 16 years later fell into financial trouble, and wound up fighting in three different courts for 17 years to stay.
The home ended up in a bank auction after the couple was sued for foreclosure in 2008 and dragged the case out for 11 years, records show, with one lawyer describing them as “shrewd and devious” litigants.
They then allegedly filed “skeleton” and “frivolous” bankruptcies, which automatically pause any eviction proceeding, records showed, and were barred from filing any further in bankruptcy court.
