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THE ‘PINNACLE’ OF TENANT ABUSE: LAWSUIT

A civil-racketeering lawsuit against one of the city’s most notorious slumlords may be upgraded to a class action, adding thousands of angry tenants to the fight against the company, lawyers said yesterday.

The original suit against Pinnacle Group and its chief officer, Joel Wiener, was filed in July by a group of Harlem residents. It accused the giant of “corporate slumlording” by turning out more than 5,000 eviction notices in two years and breaking rent-stabilization laws.

The petition for an upgrade, filed Friday, would add every Pinnacle tenant in the city to the lawsuit-some 21,000 people living in 420 Pinnacle-owned buildings. “We got a lot of press when we filed the original suit, and the result was a tremendous number of calls and e-mails from tenants saying, ‘Hey, me too!’ ” said lawyer Richard Levy.

The outcry led lawyers to investigate other Pinnacle properties, where they found more abuses, Levy said, such as alleged surveillance of tenant leaders who oppose Pinnacle.