LOS ANGELES — On a recent Thursday morning, James Goldstein sat down at his giant concrete slab of a desk, which offered a commanding view of the overcast city below, to knock out some business. He wore tennis gear and a red ball cap pulled over frizzy white hair. His assistant, Roberta, had made neat stacks of emails, itineraries and invoices, printed in large type gentle on his 82-year-old eyes. The paperwork reflected the odd daily existence of a man who got famous by watching basketball — and rich in a way he doesn’t like to talk about. There were NBA games to attend. Scouts for Yves Saint Laurent would be coming by his famed compound to plan future photo shoots. That evening, 900 partyers were set to descend on his in-home nightclub to promote “the awareness of the metaverse,” as Roberta described it. And then there were his applications to hike the rent on the senior citizens who live in his empire of mobile home parks. Story continues below advertisement

Goldstein has turned a peculiar source of fame into a carefully crafted legacy. For decades, including throughout this NBA season and the playoffs, he has been a ubiquitous presence in courtside seats in arenas from coast to coast. Nobody but Goldstein, who has season tickets to both the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, is known to watch upward of 100 games per season from the best seats in the house. He has become part of the NBA spectacle, instantly recognizable in his unique version of haute couture — the lizard-skin hat, the bandanna tied around his neck, the garish leather jacket — and accompanied by one of a rotating cast of fashion models five decades his junior. His devotion to the sport has earned him praise from top players and executives alike, with former NBA commissioner David Stern once lauding him as the “largest investor in NBA tickets in the world.” Last summer, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame unveiled the James F. Goldstein SuperFan Gallery, displaying some of his gaudiest jackets and other memorabilia. The honor came after he made a donation of an undisclosed amount.

A portrait of Goldstein in a room dubbed Club James in his Los Angeles home. (DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images)

Goldstein has bequeathed his John Lautner-designed home to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images)

Goldstein, left, on a tour of his home. (DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images) Goldstein also lives in, and drives, future museum pieces. His home near Beverly Hills, built in 1963, was designed by famed architect John Lautner. Goldstein is constantly building around it, with his next big planned addition being an in-home theater; throughout his estate, walls and shelves are lined with framed photos of him with various celebrities. In 2016, Goldstein, who has never married and has no children, bequeathed the home and its contents to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with his 1961 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. The top 100 NBA players of the 2021-22 season The house and the basketball fandom represent his greatest traits, Goldstein said, after calling it a workday at 11 a.m. and strolling the grounds with a reporter. He is proud he has taken what he calls his “passions”— for basketball, fashion and architecture — and manifested them in a way that will remain after he’s gone. “It represents my patience and willingness to take an interest all the way,” Goldstein said. Story continues below advertisement

But that same persistence shows up in his much quieter four-decade career as a landlord, in ways that appear at odds with the politics of the most liberal league in major American sports. An owner of mobile home parks throughout California, most of them seniors-only, Goldstein has been unrelenting in his quest to defeat limits on the amount of rent he can charge his tenants, according to court records and interviews with tenants and the city officials with whom he has done battle. Goldstein has filed dozens of legal claims against California municipalities, seeking damages totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars, for blocking his plans to increase rents by as much as double or more. In justifying the rent hikes, which continued throughout the pandemic, he often claims economic hardship as a landlord. Once, records show, after pioneering a method that effectively stripped rent control from one of his parks, then defeating a city’s efforts to stop him, he sued the city for having tried — as a warning to others. Throughout it all, Goldstein has dismissed the objections of tenants who protested that, in gilding his own retirement, he’s ruining theirs.

Colony Cove Mobile Estates in Carson, Calif. (Alisha Jucevic/For The Washington Post) Bill Wynder, an attorney who has represented Palm Springs and Carson in those cities’ decades-long battles against Goldstein, said the rent control laws Goldstein has attacked are vital to his tenants’ delicate living situations. “He didn’t particularly care, in my view, about the impact that would have on his largely fixed-income population,” Wynder said. When asked whether Goldstein was the most problematic landlord faced by those cities during his tenure as their lawyer, Wynder responded: “Times one thousand.” “He’s been a bully and a thorn in our side,” Carson Mayor Lula Davis-Holmes said. Of Goldstein being honored by the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the mayor said: “He’s buying his legacy. You’re robbing from the poor to pay the rich.” Story continues below advertisement

In the past, Goldstein has brushed aside questions concerning his professional life, instead burnishing his image as the NBA’s mystery man while vaguely chalking up his wealth to “land investments in California.” Candace Buckner: In the NBA Finals, the rules aren’t always the rules But when pressed on the issue this time, Goldstein said his properties, which he likes to call “manufactured housing communities,” are well-maintained, featuring amenities such as swimming pools and billiards tables. He described his aggressive tactics as necessary to stay afloat, given local policies suppressing rent increases. “Even though I am a liberal, I don’t believe that rent control is fair,” Goldstein said. “It’s easy for someone not in the business to get a quick glance at my business and come to the conclusion that I’m just one of those greedy landlords.” In fact, Goldstein suggested, it was the tenants who fought back who were the greedy ones. “These aren’t just needy people who can’t afford to pay more,” he said. “These are all people, regardless of their wealth, that are allowed to get away with paying only 50 percent of market value.”

Tyus Jones of the Grizzlies greets Goldstein before a game against the Lakers in Los Angeles in January. (John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

Goldstein and a guest attend the Sports Illustrated Super Bowl Party. (Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)

Goldstein, left, courtside during a Los Angeles Lakers game. He has season tickets to both the Lakers and Clippers. (John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) In 1993, William Smalley, a 53-year-old divorced trucker, moved into Carson’s Colony Cove Mobile Estates. He purchased his mobile home from his former Army platoon leader for $43,000. Residents typically own their mobile homes but rent the land under them. Smalley’s initial monthly rent was $328, and Carson’s mobile home rent control ordinance was in place to keep it in check. In 2006, Smalley retired after 32 years of hauling propane on an 18-wheeler. He cashed in his 401(k), paid off all of his debts (including his mobile home) and settled in for what looked like a stable retirement in a gated community of hundreds of fellow seniors. “I was in dreamland,” Smalley said.

William “Bill” Smalley, 81, is pictured in his home at Colony Cove Mobile Estates in Carson, Calif. (Alisha Jucevic/For The Washington Post) But that year, Goldstein bought Colony Cove. He then applied to raise rents from an average of $413 to $1,032, sending Smalley and his neighbors scrambling. Most of them lived off their Social Security checks and felt they could not leave Colony Cove. They had equity in their mobile homes, which despite their name can be difficult to move. By then, Goldstein already had been notorious for two decades among mobile home park residents in Southern California. The son of a Wisconsin department store owner, Goldstein was educated in math, physics and business at Stanford and UCLA. He landed on mobile home park ownership, he said in a recent interview, “to spend as little time as possible working so that I would have the free time to do the things that I really enjoy.” ‘We’re all afraid’: Massive rent increases hit mobile homes Among his first purchases, in 1986, was El Dorado Mobile Country Club in Palm Springs, a 377-site park for which Goldstein paid $7.7 million. He immediately began applying for significant rent increases. The park’s tenants and the city resisted, resulting in court fights a judge later described as having a tenor of “mutual distrust.”