Mortgage holder buys Niles house boarded up because of drug sales

The house was boarded up after its owner was indicted.
By ED RUNYAN
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- A Niles home has been sold at a sheriff's sale just several days after a judge granted a permanent injunction to keep the house boarded up because of drug activities there.
Mortgage Electronics Registrations System Inc., which held the mortgage on the house and foreclosed on it earlier this year, bought the house at 519 Mason St. for $20,000.
It had been appraised at $24,000, and the civil division of the Trumbull County Sheriff's Department set a minimum bid of $16,000 -- or two-thirds of the appraised value.
The home was owned by Charles A. Whittaker of that address, who was convicted in January on multiple counts of trafficking in cocaine in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. He was later sentenced to five years' probation.
The Ohio attorney general's office and the Trumbull County prosecutor's office then obtained a preliminary injunction Jan. 17 to have the house boarded up to prevent future drug activity.
Judge Andrew Logan granted the permanent injunction.
Nuisance-abatement program
Mark Mastrangelo, assistant attorney general in the Cleveland office, said the Niles Police Department called his office in to close down the house under the attorney general's nuisance-abatement program.
With the permanent injunction, the door and windows will remain boarded up and the utilities will remain shut off, he said. Mastrangelo said a permanent injunction secured in such cases does not take a person's house away from them but boards it up and prevents the person from occupying it. Mastrangelo said he was unaware the home was being auctioned at a sheriff's sale.