Within a few months, the real owner of the property, who bought it from Morris at a foreclosure auction a few years earlier, was telling them to leave and the city was threatening to shut off the water over a $4,600 unpaid bill. The couple moved out a few months later and Brown sued Morris for $5,000, which included their security deposit and "pain and suffering." He settled for $4,000.
"It was crazy," Powell said. "It's almost funny now. But at the time, it wasn't funny. We were trying to figure out how in the heck we were going to bathe."
Morris called the dispute a misunderstanding between him and the property's true owner, who declined to comment.
"The agreement was, in order for him to get resources from that property I would rent it [out], and those rent payments went to him," Morris said. "It was absolutely a misunderstanding, and [the owner] almost immediately got those proceeds."
During the time Morris owned the house, court records also show at least four judgments against him for money owed to automobile financing companies - and one documenting efforts to repossess a 1993 Lexus GS300. He also accumulated repeated judgments and wage garnishments from two homeowners associations, which he attributed to a philosophical disagreement over whether he was required to pay them fees.
Morris said most of the cases were so old he had forgotten the details. He said he is unsure how many creditors still have claims against him, and for how much, but was not surprised to learn that some plan to seek part of his school system salary.
"If you're telling me there's an old case from 1999 where someone says I still owe them money, it's not shocking to me, but I don't know what it is," he said.
The court records contain more recent cases, including the judgments for unpaid rent last year and $3,876 owed to the insurance brokerage.
Court records also show Morris' business struggling to make money. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he and several partners operated a group of companies, including an investment advisory firm and an insurance brokerage, that operated within an umbrella company called Legacy Unlimited.
According to a 1999 article in Black Enterprise magazine, the firm held exclusive deals to oversee the retirement plans for Morgan State University, Coppin State College and the public school system in Richmond, Va., and also had "an educational initiative with the city of Baltimore, teaching financial planning to 14,000 employees."
