CITY HALL CALLS one of his run-down houses a “blight on the neighborhood,” and says he owes taxpayers $50,000 in fines and legal costs for ignoring years of cleanup orders at other properties.
But the combative Chris Demopolis, an eccentric millionaire who keeps such a low profile at his modest Green Lake apartment that he was able to avoid a city process server 24 times in a row, isn’t planning to pay up soon.
Since he has dozens of active lawsuits bearing his name, a throng of lawyers on his trail, and civil judgments against him costing as much as $3 million in recent years, Demopolis’ City Hall tab isn’t exactly a priority. Besides, Demopolis—a litigation-happy 80-year-old bachelor— has devised a new legal strategy: Die, leave his money to charity, and let the “sharks”— his pet term for attorneys—sort it out.
“I’m dying now—the courts are killing me,” Demopolis said in a recent interview. A member of a Greek family that once ran a marine equipment business in Anacortes, Demopolis dropped his law school plans to become an investor, learning to prowl the courthouse in pursuit of foreclosed properties on the public auction block and buying them for a fraction of their value.
His land holdings today number almost 90 various-sized parcels in Seattle and the surrounding region, some of it valuable undeveloped waterfront. He made and lost millions, though they couldn’t buy him lasting good health. His aged Linden Avenue North apartment is decorated with an assortment of canes, crutches, and walkers (he also has a wheelchair).
“I’m in tough shape,” he says in a foggy voice, a little doped up on his many prescription drugs. “I met a guy from my war [WWII] recently, and he was a ghost of a man. I realized then how far along I was.”
Demopolis stubbornly claims that the local attorneys’ bar has blacklisted him for maligning its members. Out of necessity, he has become the apparent king of citizen litigants: those who file their own papers and argue their own cases.
He has sued, or been sued, ad nauseam—over land sales, property disputes, and legal fee collections. He may be the local record holder for unpaid attorney bills—as much as several hundred thousand dollars, court records show.
For more than 20 years, King County’s courthouse computer screens have been steadily filling up with pages of Demopolis’ contentious lawsuits, many of them originally handwritten as well as personally argued by him. He’s also on file in Snohomish and Skagit counties.
It hasn’t gone well. Of the 95 cases he’s been involved in, he figures he’s lost most of them—at one point, 40 in a row.
The last attorney who would actually work for him “had his office in the back seat of his car,” Demopolis says. But he was able to recently hire well-known local attorney Jim Lobsenz to handle an ongoing appeal for him.
“I think everybody deserves a lawyer— I don’t run them past my personal approval meter,” says Lobsenz, who once represented triple-murderer Charles Campbell.
As a dissatisfied law customer, Demopolis years ago successfully sued to bring lawyers under state consumer-protection laws, stirring up bad blood. He has since gotten tossed out of more than one legal firm’s offices just for being Demopolis.
He also unsuccessfully sued to stop King County judges from smoking in their chambers. They never forgot, he says.
“You tell a judge today you’re suing Demopolis, and the judge will say, ‘For how much? It’s Demopolis. Don’t you want more?'” (Demopolis insists that litigants no longer bother to even notify him when they sue. “I have to call up the court clerk’s office regularly and ask if any new suits have been filed against me.”)
Fortunately or unfortunately, his health has now become part of his legal defense. For example, after finally getting nailed by a process server (on his 25th try) delivering the city’s “blight” lawsuit, Demopolis wrote the court that he was sick from, among other things, a heart attack, diabetes, cancer, aggravated war wounds from his days as a B-17 navigator, and a failing memory. “I cannot even remember my name at times,” he penned.
He argued he was just too ill to come in and fight the judgments—four municipal court rulings totaling $50,000. Firing a volley of motions, he held the city off until a fed-up county judge issued a failure-to-appear arrest warrant.
He reluctantly made an appearance and posted $500 bail, which was handed over to the city as partial payment. That left $49,500 to go, an amount still due to this day.
City Attorney Mark Sidran also recently filed a new complaint against a property Demopolis owns on Northeast 88th Street, which suffers from “major overgrowth around the house and premises, substantial defects in the foundation . . . rotted and deteriorated structural elements . . . substantial roof leaks and many broken windows.” These conditions date back to at least 1997.
Sidran’s office, in a court brief, says that even after four years, Demopolis “continues to ignore the problems he has created or allowed to exist at the property, and/or give excuses as to why he is unable to comply. Despite . . . [his] actual knowledge that the property is in violation of City Land Use laws . . . despite court actions and civil penalties and despite [his] actual knowledge of the unsafe and illegal conditions at the property, [he has] failed or refused to act. . . .”
The city proposes cleaning up the mess and charging Demopolis. If he fails to pay, the land could be subject to a lien and sale, as could his other properties in separate city disputes.
The ailing Demopolis figures he may just will those and all the other messy suits to the Red Cross or Salvation Army, whichever one inherits his millions in assets.
He’s so serious about a looming demise that he can hear “lawyers and judges already stomping on my grave,” he says, though some of his legal foes have doubts. “He’s always dying—read his writs,” says one attorney.
Demopolis nonetheless is preparing for the worst, reflecting back on his “years of getting screwed over.” He has found at least one highlight. “I’ve alienated the whole Court of Appeals in Seattle,” he says, delighted. If nothing else, it’s a memorable epitaph.
