Bad Buzz: King Bee building residents have turned on downtown St. Louis developers Sam Glasser and Dave Jump

Clerks at Jump's company, American Milling, had handled the condo association's finances until 2006. Pozzo and Michael McVeigh, another member of the King Bee Nine, discovered the questionable elevator bills after they took over the bookkeeping. "I was very surprised," Pozzo says. "Everyone in the association was under the impression the temporary staffing of the elevator was being paid for by King Bee Building LLC."

Roth is the Pozzos' next-door neighbor, but Bauer doesn't live in the building. He is the co-owner of a photography studio on the eighth floor and, the Pozzos found out later, had a business relationship with Glasser.

Bauer is in the apartment-management business, and says that after he met Glasser he worked a stint as director of operations for his firm, Samuel & Co. Bauer declined to go into further detail. "That's stuff I'm not going to comment on until the litigation's over," he says. Roth also declined to comment on the feud.

Residents hoped to oust Roth and Bauer from the board during a special meeting on April 20, 2006, but Glasser thwarted the effort. Everyone was assembled on folding chairs in the King Bee's plush, carpeted lobby.

Scott Pozzo says Glasser began by questioning whether the bylaws allowed for a recall vote. Then, Pozzo recalls, Glasser declared as creator of the condo association: "As of this moment, I'm firing everybody. There is no board." Pozzo says, "He proceeded to reappoint himself, Bob and Traci." Amanda Pozzo adds, "Jaws just dropped in the room. No one knew what to say to that."

There was more turmoil to come. The shakeup left two open seats, and Jim Holtrop wanted to run for one of them. Around that time, Holtrop says he began receiving anonymous faxes of news articles about his tax-credit fraud conviction. So the Holtrops sent an e-mail, coming clean with their neighbors.

Once elected, Holtrop wasn't going to let the $68,000 tab slide. Last August, the board sent a letter to King Bee Building LLC asking for reimbursement. Glasser and Jump didn't respond, so at a meeting in September, Holtrop pointed out that under the bylaws, anyone who owes money to the association cannot vote.

Then Holtrop moved to declare that King Bee Building was not in "good standing." Glasser didn't attend the meeting, and Holtrop's motion was approved.

Six weeks later, King Bee Building turned to a St. Louis Circuit Court judge to stop Holtrop and his allies from running the association. The petition, filed November 7, 2007, alleges that seven residents formed a subgroup "dominated by the will and influence of Defendant Jim Holtrop..."

Puricelli says Glasser and Jump have a right to vote because they didn't owe the $68,000 in the first place. The oft-cited memo, he notes, promised only that King Bee Building would pay for repairs. "It did not say they would take the additional step of paying for the staffing," he says.

St. Louis Judge Edward Sweeney is expected to settle the dispute after a hearing June 10. Says Puricelli, "I'm just trying to get them reinstated as a member, so they can move on with the governing of the condominium."

Patty Morrow keeps copious notes about the King Bee in round, girlish handwriting. A 32-year-old nurse, she bought her 1,200-square-foot condo for $153,000 in April 2007, after living with her sister for a year to save money. "This is my investment that I worked really hard to purchase," she says. "And I had it inspected, so I thought it was OK."

Morrow learned of the code violations last fall when she applied for a permit to install central air conditioning and found out there was a moratorium on permits at 1709 Washington Avenue.

Dismayed, she spent half a day at city hall trying to understand what was going on. She talked to a mechanical inspector who told her the heating system wasn't up to code because several furnaces shared a common flue. This, he said, could allow the spread of carbon monoxide.

"At that point, my heart just sank," she says. "I had a lot of sleepless nights because I was scared. I put all this time and money into this place."

Frank Oswald believes the King Bee slipped through a crack in the system. In what the city calls a "Housing Conservation District," no building or apartment can accept a new occupant without the proper inspection. But downtown, like several other neighborhoods, does not fall into one of these districts.

If it weren't for that gap, Oswald says, "I don't think we would've had anybody moving in, because a real estate agent wouldn't have closed without an occupancy permit." (Oswald notes that Mayor Francis Slay recently signed an ordinance requiring occupancy permits throughout the city starting next year.)