Glass and his partner, Elliot Kurlander, a childhood friend, hardly seemed to be driven by ambition. A yeshiva boy from Brighton Beach, where his father, a survivor of a Siberian labor camp, worked for Pechter’s Bakery, Glass had gone into real estate after receiving a master’s degree in child education from Long Island University. People always need buildings, his family said, so he and Kurlander found a cheap one on Ludlow and Stanton. (Kurlander, who has not been charged with any crime, refused to be interviewed for this story.)

“It was a backdoor play,” Glass told me in the counsel room at the Brooklyn Men’s House of Detention. His face was ashen, his voice softened to a whisper. “We took over a hardware store, and the owner eventually said the building had to come with it. He was basically giving it to us for free. I didn’t start off thinking I needed $1,000 a week to live; I started with modest aspirations. It’s not like a one-year boom of success with mortgages and borrowing and schemes to hike the rent and evict people. There are people who have nothing rents. They can’t pay more.”

It was the cheap rent that had drawn Glass’s tenants to Ludlow Street in the first place. Bordered on the north by Katz’s Deli on Houston Street and on the south by the projects hovering over Delancey Street, the area had been home to successive generations of Russian Jews, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans who settled there and eventually moved on. However, by the early eighties, the gentrification of the East Village and the tight rental market throughout the city had sent the young and hip scurrying into one of the last unhyped areas in Manhattan. Ludlow Street was cheap and convenient, and Glass was known as an easy touch. He didn’t ask for references or expensive deposits; all he wanted was the first and last month’s rent and a promise you’d pay reasonably on time. His apartments weren’t renovated, the common areas were often falling down, and Glass usually didn’t bother with written leases, but tenants who wanted to renovate merely had to ask, and he would allow them to deduct the cost of the materials (if not the labor) from their rent. For six years, I was one of them. In 1982, I moved into a black shell of an apartment, a classic railroad flat with a tub in the kitchen and rats in the wall, but by the time I left, I had a brightly painted apartment with a shower stall, thanks to Glass.

By 1990, Ludlow Street was developing a weird kind of reverse status. Kiki Smith, Izhar Patkin, Jim Casebere, Erika Beckman, Ellen Berkenblit, Joseph Nechvatal, and dozens of other artists lived and worked there, and the once-deserted blocks had started sprouting bars, restaurants, boutiques, and hot clubs.

Among the first of these pioneers was the millinery and dress shop of Amy Downs and Mary Adams, which opened on the corner of Stanton Street in 1986. Downs, a Minneapolis native who speaks with a Twin Cities twang, was a tenant in one of Glass’s buildings, struggling to get her hat business off the ground. One day, out of the blue, Glass suggested she take over the hardware store on the corner of Ludlow and Stanton. He would give her six months’ free rent and let her renovate the store any way she wanted. “I know it sounds corny,” she says, “but he really gave me a break in New York. He gave me my chance. He said, ‘I think you’re talented and hardworking, and I have a store. Do you want one?’ Somewhere down the line, I think he expected us to return his investment, and we did -- but it wasn’t the money he was after. I think he thought it would be fun, and even fantasized about going into the fashion business.”

Indeed, whether it was about business or about the neighborhood girls, whom he would ogle and sometimes joke with about trading rent for sex, Glass often seemed to talk a big game. He may have been utterly committed to his family and to living an Orthodox Jewish life, but Ludlow Street’s seamy success had an undeniable pull on him. After Uli Rimkus, a German artist who was another tenant in one of his buildings, decided to start a bar in a vacant store up the block, Glass gave her four months’ free rent and various credit references. Max Fish soon became a big hit. “One day the Times reported that it was the hottest bar in town, and Mark came over and said, ‘You see this? I made this happen,’” remembers Gadi Gilan, the owner of an antiques store in one of Glass’s buildings on the south side of Houston Street between the Bowery and Elizabeth Street.

But Gilan also witnessed the results of Glass’s largesse firsthand when he started his own restaurant, Café Colonial, on the corner of Elizabeth and Houston. “Landlords are usually horrible,” he says. “If you’re a day late, they penalize you; if you need repairs, they won’t help. These guys gave you help if you needed it. It’s trust, the old Jewish way of doing business, like on 47th Street. You make a deal, say mazel and broche, shake hands, and it’s done.”

Not all of Glass’s tenants thought he was such a mensch. “Believe me,” says one who prefers not to be identified in print, “when he needed the rent, he’d let me know. He was threatening. I was scared of him.” She says that Glass often played favorites with tenants and could be intimidating if need be, especially with the elderly.

Brigitte Marx wasn’t scared of Glass -- at least not at first. We meet at Baby Jake’s, a grungy Tex-Mex bar near Houston Street; she is wearing a crinkly black rayon overcoat over a black turtleneck sweater and brown velvet jeans. Her hair is stringy, her hands blotchy, and she never stops twisting her gold rings of snakes and cats. She says she knows she shouldn’t be talking to a reporter, but she is afraid Glass will smear her, even from behind bars.