Chilton Avenue a Bit Safer Today As Pescrillo’s Financial Woes Worsen

They moved out... Phillip Howard - Attempted rape 2nd degree. Thomas Chew - Criminal sexual act in the second degree and Sexual abuse in the first degree Ricky Horton - Criminal Sexual act in the first degree- less than 11 yoa. Shawn Blount - Rape in the third degree. Dale Goff - Sexual abuse in the first degree.

The monsters on Chilton Avenue are gone.

Ralph Pescrillo’s home for wayward sex offenders at 681 Chilton Ave. now sits empty, and the owner himself finds that the bottom feeding real estate empire he put together with the help of Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster and the New York State Parole Board teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, foreclosure and massive tax debt.

Pescrillo, who up until recently was Dyster’s next door neighbor on Orchard Parkway, owns more than 100 houses in Niagara Falls. His business plan involved bringing registered sex offenders and other parolees to the city to fill them.

There’s big money in sex offenders. Because nobody will hire them, every aspect of their existence needs to be subsidized by the state, using your tax dollars. Medical care, food, shelter, you name it. You are picking up the tab.

In 1999, he paid $47,000 for the six-bedroom, two bath Victorian style home at 681 Chilton Ave. The house, built in 1910, was built as a two-unit apartment house.

Chilton Avenue used to be one of the prestige neighborhoods in the city, home to doctors, bankers and lawyers. The houses are large and the 19th Century architecture is often stunning. The street is lined with century-old maples and the sound of children playing on warm summer nights adds to the bucolic ambience.

Pescrillo immediately filled the house with a half dozen of the most violent and depraved perverts the state had available.

Neighbors on Chilton complained to City Hall, saying he’s running a rooming house in an area not zoned for such use, but thus far the Dyster administration has turned a deaf ear.

“I’ve got a four-year-old grandson who visits me here,” said Jane, a close neighbor who is fearful of having her real name used. “Now I can’t let him out of the house by himself.”

Jane said she has personally complained to Councilwoman Kristen Grandinetti, who is also a neighbor of Pescrillo’s on Orchard Parkway. Grandinetti did nothing to address the problem, she said.

Neighbors finally brought their complaints to the Niagara Falls Reporter, which launched a long running investigative series into Pescrillo and the practice of warehousing registered sex offenders in Niagara Falls.

At one registered sex offender for every 305 residents, Niagara Falls has the highest per capita population of sexual predators of any city in the state. There are currently 163 registered sex offenders living here, just enough to put the city over the 50,000-resident threshold in the 2010 census needed to rake in millions of dollars in state and federal funding based on population.

In the past, Dyster has spoken approvingly of the state Parole Board’s efforts to dump sex offenders and other undesirables here, noting that, “They’ve got to live someplace.”

But it wasn’t Dyster or even bad publicity that ran the monsters off of Chilton Avenue. Sources told the Reporter that the number of sex offenders living in the house had dwindled to three, and Pescrillo was attempting to rent the other bedrooms in the house privately, with little success.

It’s understandable. Not even down and outers would want to live under the same roof as say, Dale Goff, a hulking 250-pounder who molested two boys, ages 6 and 10, in 1992, did a prison stretch, and on release in 2006, attempted to rape a five-year-old girl.

Or Thomas Chew, who was classified as sexually violent by the state Parole Board and was convicted of forcing two young girls, ages 11 and 13, to engage in oral and anal sex with him.

Sources said Pescrillo finally threw the pedophiles out late last month. His future plans for the house are unclear, but it is apparent that the politically connected landlord is having financial problems unrelated to perverts.

Back in January, Federal District Court Judge William M. Skretney threw out an appeal brought by Pescrillo to an earlier decision in bankruptcy court that opened the door for HSBC Bank to foreclose on three multi-unit apartments he owned on Buffalo Avenue, 74th Street and Packard Road.

The case had been dragging through the courts for five years, and Skretney’s decision came as the final blow to Pescrillo’s attempts to keep the properties. Many of his other houses are heavily mortgaged, and even more are years behind in back taxes.

Landlords like Pescrillo are not unusual in the Niagara Falls of Mayor Paul Dyster. Many do not even live in the city. There are currently more than 700 vacant and abandoned homes and businesses in the city, “zombie houses” used by prostitutes, drug dealers and the occasional mad killer for their own purposes.

In general, lending institutions are reluctant to foreclose on Niagara Falls properties and the city itself sometimes bends over backwards to keep from taking a property for tax debt.

On Chilton Avenue, the residents are rejoicing but little, however. Since Pescrillo first opened his freak show there, a not for profit organization called Oxford House purchased a home at 628 Chilton Ave. An impressive Victorian with a turret and six bedrooms, Oxford House picked it up for $40,000. It had been converted into a two unit apartment at some time in its more recent past, but the not for profit wasn’t interested in restoring it.

Oxford House claims that its purpose is to provide housing for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, but the fact that many of these have recently been released from prison, often for sex offenses, is not mentioned in their literature.

One of the first residents the organization brought in was Lawrence Lipford, 48, a happy go lucky sort who, in 1997, attempted to rape a seven--year-old girl.

Dyster made Chilton Avenue and his own street, Orchard Parkway, into an official historic district back in 2011, offering tax incentives and grant money to those purchasing homes there and fixing them up. The result has been nothing short of disastrous to those who already owned on Chilton, with both real estate predators and the sexual variety being the primary beneficiaries.