Opportunity knocks

To neighbors, they're just the empty apartment or foreclosed home next door. To squatters like Robert Wright, they're targets for easy living.

Meet Robert L. Wright. He's a convicted sex offender, woman-beater, stalker, drug dealer, robber, B&E artist, plus a purported pimp. He's also homeless and always looking for a place to crash, court records show.

He could be your new next-door neighbor.

The 44-year-old Wright is a squatter, police say in a South Boston District Court trespassing case that is ongoing. While the current foreclosure crisis may have shuttered the futures of countless homeowners, it has opened doors for Wright and other opportunistic squatters who seize on vulnerable living spaces.

In the well-known foreclosure freefall zone on Hendry Street on Dorchester's Meetinghouse Hill, records show, city inspectors reported last year that two vacant buildings there served as safe houses for loaded handguns, packets of crack cocaine, and a group of squatters.

Real estate broker Marc Charney says that in liquidating properties in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, he is encountering increasing numbers of savvy squatters. When the real-estate market in those neighborhoods was robust four years ago, he says, such interlopers were sporadic. But today's squatters, he says, often pirate electricity from nearby houses, or demand cash to leave the premises, or strip the buildings of resellable copper on the way out.

"There is definitely an organized - albeit street-organized - world going around with this," says Charney, president of CharneyRealEstate.com. "There is a direct correlation between property that is foreclosed and the level of the squatting."

Robert "Bobby" Wright's wanderings indicate that you never know where and when he'll show up. He could not be reached for comment, as court documents show he'd been on the lam until last Monday, when he was arrested in one of his squatting outposts. His lawyer declined to comment.

As a veteran street vagabond, according to court documents, Wright has made himself at home in a building under construction at the Cathedral public housing development in the South End, where police found him rummaging through copper wire at 2 a.m.; a hallway and elevator at the same development; the Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House homeless shelters; a crack house in Lowell; the Chinatown T station; and a tidy apartment in South Boston that belongs to an elderly and infirm woman - his mother.

It was there, at his mom's ground-level flat in the West Broadway public housing development, that police responded on twin nights in late June to long-festering complaints from residents and managers that drugging, squatting, and possible prostitution were going on there, according to a police report.

The commotion struck tenants as strange, according to records and interviews, since Wright's mother had not lived there since December while she mended a bad hip, and only two grandsons had been allowed to also use that as their home, at least one of whom is still staying there.

On June 24, police say, they discovered three females in the apartment who appeared high on drugs. Dirty and clean syringes were strewn about a place that, a recent visit with family members revealed, proudly displayed loving portraits on the walls.

The following night, police say, they uncovered two squatters inside: the Wright brothers. Robert was hiding in a rear bedroom, Darryll in a front bedroom closet, under a pile of clothes. Hanging in the living room of the apartment is a framed proverb that says: "Mothers hold their children's hands for a short while but their hearts forever."

Records say Darryll (a.k.a. Darrell) Wright, 47, is a career criminal and convicted sex offender - just like his younger brother, Robert.

Both pleaded not guilty to trespassing in South Boston District Court.

"Robert and Darryll Wright have lengthy criminal histories and have no business" on Boston Housing Authority property, says Lydia Agro, an agency spokeswoman.

Robert Wright was barred from authority grounds in December 2006, court documents say, after two run-ins at Cathedral.

Several days after the first one, a police officer responded to a complaint that two people would not get off an elevator there: Wright and a 23-year-old woman from Revere. For three days, residents told the officer, they'd been holed up in a nearby hallway doing drugs.

Wright balked at leaving the elevator, records say, telling the officer he grew up at Cathedral and nobody was going to tell him to go.

Apparently furious, he started moving toward the officer, only to be halted by a shot of pepper spray to the face.

About six residents witnessed the confrontation, documents show, but they told police they didn't want to be identified. "The residents are fearful of Mr. Wright," reads the police report.

It was not the only time during his life as a street menace that Robert Wright has sent out shivers of dread.

In a 1988 incident, a Boston nurse testified, Wright followed her to her car and accosted her while wielding a knife.

"I was terrified," the woman testified, trial records say.

Wright was convicted of indecent assault and battery.

In 1994, records show, an ex-girlfriend went to the Somerville police station and said Wright had threatened to kill her, burn down her house, and harm her elderly mother.

Wright was convicted of stalking and making threats.

In 2006, a 24-year-old woman with a lengthy record of prostitution convictions told police through tears that Wright had punched her when she refused to "work the street" for him.

Wright was found guilty of assault and battery.

During a 2003 interview with a court clinician, Wright began crying himself when he described his own miserable state: He was an eighth-grade dropout who'd spent more than half his adult life behind bars. His singular cyclone of crime, he said, sprang from his desire for drugs - a relationship that he began at age 19 by shooting cocaine, and that also included up to a $200-a-day heroin habit.

"Needed money to do my thing," Wright is quoted in court records.

Some inside and outside the courthouse wonder: How can a man now be out of jail when he has amassed an arrest record that is 12 pages long and has 82 entries beginning when he was 12 years old? Answers seem to be buried in those same records.

In the parlance of the defense bar, Wright has been doing a life sentence on the installment plan: lately committing mostly petty crimes that keep him shuttling in and out of jail rather than more serious offenses with longer sentences.

Wright also appears to be a master at working an overworked legal system, a jailhouse lawyer who peppers the court with "respectfully submitted" requests to reduce his bail or sentence when it suits him, and failing to appear in court at all - or register with police as a sex offender - when it doesn't.

Mixed in with that is the kind of street bravado that led him in April to take the wheel of a '96 Acura, even though his right to drive had been revoked in 2004. Police say they nabbed him speeding down the Southeast Expressway.

Wright's mother was at his side during harsh court proceedings in the past, documents show, but now her own space is being threatened by her son's alleged squatting wrongs.

In early July, the BHA says, it began eviction proceedings against his mother, maintaining she's responsible for what goes on in her apartment.

"The . . . alleged activities in this case are of a very serious criminal nature," Agro says, "and are not activities that we tolerate" on the authority's grounds.

Which doesn't mean that his mom will be put out on the street.

"We reserve our right to consider the best outcome for the legitimate tenants in the household," Agro says.

In an interview at the West Broadway apartment, one of Robert Wright's sisters says their mother didn't know what may have been happening there in her absence.

"She's 81 years old," the sister says. "She doesn't need that mess."

The sister, in her mid-50s, says she's a religious person, and asked not to be identified because her path is so different from Wright's.

"I love my brother," she says. "I just want him on the right track."

Robert Wright, meanwhile, on July 8 did not show up in Boston Municipal Court for two criminal cases, including the illegal driving charge. Last Monday, however, he was arrested on default warrants by police who found him back squatting at his mother's place in Southie. Once again, the court set him free, and told him to come back in September.

Meanwhile, Wright remains living in parts unknown - one of his many homes away from home.

Ric Kahn can be reached at rkahn@globe.com.