Lawyers for Maria Garcia’s landlord took her to Housing Court on three separate occasions to force her to pay rent she didn’t owe. In the end, a judge ruled in her favor and against her landlord, telling her not to pay any rent until she received compensation.

For Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who doesn’t speak English, the landlord’s motivation for taking her to court was clear. She told the judge, through a translator, “I feel that the trial was motivated by racism, my not speaking English.”

Garcia’s case underscores what is happening to tenants at 2720 Grand Concourse, a rent-stabilized building owned by Jacob “Jake the Snake” Selechnik, who is routinely listed as one of the city’s worst landlords.

Tenants say Selechnik is harassing them into leaving through a variety of shameful tactics so he can jack up rents in the building to the point (above $2,000) where it will no longer be protected by stabilization requirements.

Neither Selechnik nor his lawyers returned calls seeking explanation.

Already at least five tenants have moved out because of the pressure. Another longtime resident suffered a heart attack that residents attributed to rent worries. The woman’s daughter took her upstate to get away from it all.

Others have discussed leaving, but most are digging in for the long haul.

On Valentine’s Day, tenants stormed Selechnik’s offices in Riverdale demanding he dissolve an exorbitant Major Capital Improvements (MCI) rent increase, which far exceeded the maximum 6 percent allowed in rent-stabilized apartments each year (see “Tenants Send Broken Hearts to Landlord Over Rent Hike,” Norwood News, Feb. 21 edition).

The next day, the city’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which oversees and grants rent increases, sat down with Selechnik’s management group, 2720 LLC, which is headed by his daughter, Ellen Selechnik, and told them they couldn’t charge tenants more than a 6 percent increase each year.

(The tenants have filed an appeal to have the MCI revoked because there is little evidence any improvements were actually made, but DHCR has not ruled on it yet. Tenants filed Freedom of Information Law requests for the documents pertaining to the MCI approval, but DHCR sent back an obviously incomplete set of paperwork. DHCR did not return calls requesting comment for this article.)

Still, lawyers for 2720 LLC began taking tenants, like Garcia, to court for not paying past due amounts that they didn’t owe.

In some cases, tenants with Spanish-sounding last names have received similar letters have received handwritten notes saying they needed to pay a lump sum of money that should, legally, be paid out over the course of several years, at a maximum of 6 percent per year. The note essentially says, in Spanish, to pay the whole amount or else.

At least four other tenants have been taken to court. All of them are black.

Tenant leader Dino Rossi, who is white, has a veritable forest of documents and paperwork in his living room related to what he considers a systematic attempt by Selechnik to bully residents into leaving.

“I know racism and sexism and prejudice when I see it,” said Rossi, who is openly gay and says he has experienced homophobia in his own building. But while Selechnik’s tactics seem blatantly wrong and in some cases, possibly illegal, it’s not so easy to prove. “They’ve used plausible deniability and taken it to an art form.”

Tenant Association President Mary Corsey, who is black, thought she was smart and tough enough to fight Selechnik on her own, but she was wrong. When facing Selechnik’s lawyers in Housing Court, she said she was badly overmatched. “It was like I had rocks and they had machine guns.”

Afraid of being evicted, Corsey agreed to pay double what she should have. Later, Corsey retained a private lawyer and had the agreement overturned.

Now tenants, with help from the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, are trying to consolidate legal representation through the Urban Justice Center (UJC), a nonprofit organization, and fight Selechnik on a united front.

Garrett Wright, a UJC lawyer working on the 2720 case, said what he’s seeing there is consistent with tactics used by other large family operations and private equity firms such as Pinnacle, which was penalized by the Attorney General for rent gouging in 2006 following a series of articles by the Norwood News and other newspapers.

“Landlords have an incentive [to push tenants out], because they want to push rents up past $2,000 to get them out of rent stabilization levels,” Wright said. He added that many of these private equity firms like Pinnacle use these tactics as a “business model” to lure investors.

On top of the suspicious rent increase and legal bullying, 2720 LLC failed to install the correct sized mailboxes, forcing tenants to travel a mile to the nearest post office to retrieve their mail. The mail center on 188th Street and Third Avenue is only open from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. each day, making it difficult, especially for those who work in Manhattan, to get timely and valuable information, including social security checks used for rent and legal documents and court hearing requests.

Tenants who don’t show up to court dates are subject to default judgments that usually rule against them.

Rafael Pimentel, a retired 72-year-old tenant who has lived in the building for 30 years, called the mailboxes just another effort to force residents out. “It’s bologna,” he said. He added that on his latest lease, the landlords left off his wife’s name, the first time that’s happened while he’s been living at 2720. “If something happens to me, then they get rid of me and my family.”