A Baltimore Man Charges $2,000 to Push Squatters Out Because Maryland's Courts Won't

A Baltimore-area man who goes by "Mikey" and calls his crew the Wolf Pack has turned squatter removal into a full-time business. He charges landlords roughly $2,000 a job, according to Fox Baltimore reporter Gary Collins, who spent time with Mikey at a construction site his company was clearing.

Mikey's real name is Sanchez Deandre Lewis. He told Collins he left prison six years ago and has since built out a tiered service for removing squatters across Maryland and Washington, D.C., earning him the nickname "Squatter King" or "Eviction King" on the street.

His method isn't physical removal. It's pressure. Collins reported that Mikey's team removes doors and windows, tows vehicles, and cuts off access to a property in order to make it uncomfortable enough that occupants leave on their own.

"Police said we can't remove somebody, so lawfully, the only thing we can do is what we could do," Mikey told Collins.

Maryland law generally requires property owners to go through the courts, including wrongful-detainer proceedings, to remove an unauthorized occupant. Police in Maryland typically won't remove someone claiming tenancy without a court order, even when the lease looks fake. Collins noted the tactics Mikey uses sit in a legally precarious space, since self-help removal can carry real legal risk for property owners, especially if an occupant claims to be a legitimate tenant.

Why a business like this exists at all

A reasonable tenant-rights advocate would point out that court-ordered eviction exists precisely to prevent landlords from using intimidation, illegal lockouts, or forced entry to remove people, some of whom may in fact have legal tenancy claims worth adjudicating. That protection matters when a landlord is wrong, or when a genuine renter falls behind on rent during a hardship and deserves due process before losing housing. Fast-tracking removal without judicial review risks throwing out legitimate tenants alongside fraudulent ones.

But that safeguard only works if the court system built to replace self-help actually functions on a reasonable timeline. Collins' reporting, building on a year of prior coverage of squatting rings operating in Baltimore, describes a gap where slow civil court procedures and expanded tenant protections have made it hard for property owners to get fraudulent occupants out through the system that's supposed to handle it. When formal legal recourse takes months, property owners facing organized squatter gangs using forged leases are left choosing between an empty legal remedy and paying someone like Mikey $2,000 to apply pressure that stays just inside the lines of the law.

Collins' prior reporting, referenced in his July 22, 2026 coverage, documented squatting rings operating in Baltimore over the past year using fraudulent leases to occupy properties throughout the metro area. The scale of that problem is what created demand for someone offering to solve it outside the courtroom.

The political response

Collins' reporting notes that Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, has faced pressure as a result of the prior squatting coverage. What specific legislative or administrative response Moore's office has announced, if any, isn't detailed in the available reporting. That's the open question: does Annapolis move to speed up wrongful-detainer proceedings, or does the enforcement gap that created the market for Mikey's services stay exactly where it is.

Maryland isn't unique in wrestling with this balance. States across the country, red and blue, have struggled to write eviction rules that protect legitimate tenants without leaving property owners defenseless against fraud. The gap has grown wide enough, and slow enough, to produce an actual commercial enterprise built around filling it. Whether Maryland lawmakers view that as a market failure worth fixing or a story overblown by conservative media is the question state legislators will have to answer the next time this comes up in Annapolis.