Communications between the City of Aurora and the counsel of a troubled apartment complex show that officials understood the owners of Aspen Grove at 1568 Nome St. wanted the local government to board up the building in order to take back “control of the property” from a Venezuelan gang.

The information was revealed after the city released — following the threat of a lawsuit from The Denver Gazette — a cache of unredacted emails to and from the attorney representing CBZ Management that were requested under the Colorado Open Records Act, or CORA.

Officials earlier released the records to The Denver Gazette — but they were heavily redacted. Practically speaking, the only unredacted information were people’s contact info contained in the email chain.

“To be clear, my impression from what has been occurring generally is that your client has been asking for the City to take this action in order for your client ‘ to take control of the property’ and to sell the property,” Peter Schulte, Aurora’s assistant city attorney, wrote CBZ Management’s attorney on Aug. 6.

A week later, officials evicted about 300 residents, citing health and safety issues.

“The property owners didn’t know what else to do,” Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said.

Jurinsky — who began sounding the alarm in the community about the Venezuelan gang — helped the city negotiate a deal to “condemn” the building, which would effectively evict the gang members.

“The city knew that the property had no staff on it,” Jurinsky said. Jurinsky added: “They knew damn

well the property had been taken over by gangs.”

In the email exchanges from Aug. 5 through Aug. 12, the attorneys negotiated an agreement for Aurora officials to drop all charges against the owner of the Aspen Grove apartment complex in exchange for selling the property, leasing it — or a coming up with a “similar disposition” — and assuming up to $60,000 of the cost to board up and secure the building.

Based in Brooklyn, CBZ Management operates rental apartments in New York and Colorado, with 11 properties in Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. The three complexes the company owns in Aurora — Aspen Grove, The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines — have all been identified by the owners as having been taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua or TDA.

TDA began as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela that quickly expanded into the western hemisphere following the economic contraction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The gang is involved in a sundry of criminal activities that include kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, human trafficking — particularly immigrant women and girls — and drug trafficking.

Federal officials have confirmed their activity in the Denver metro region.

Earlier this month, The Denver Gazette requested emails between CBZ Management’s attorney and the city under CORA In their final response, Aurora officials redacted all but the salutations in the bulk of the emails, claiming the exchanges represented “attorney work product.”

Under CORA, government agencies can assert certain privileges to withhold information. Examples include proprietary information or for a law enforcement investigation or work product, such as drafts. For an email to be “work product,” it would need to contain an attorney’s drafts or theories or impressions shared internally. Put another way, the CORA exemption is designed to protect the thought process for the government entity’s attorney.

Steve Zansberg, a First Amendment attorney in Denver, called the redactions “unjustifiable.”

“The city may assert that the city and CBZ Management shared a ‘common interest’ such that the work product doctrine was not waived, but it is generally understood that adversaries in pending litigation do not share a ‘common interest’ preventing waiver,” Zansberg said in an email to The Denver Gazette.

Last year, Zansberg prevailed in a lawsuit brought by a media coalition that included The Denver Gazette challenging the legality of the Denver school district’s executive session to discuss the policy of returning police to campus in the wake of the shooting that wounded two East High School administrators.

After initially insisting that the redactions were permitted under CORA, city officials backtracked after Zansberg wrote that The Denver Gazette intends to file an application for an order to show cause.

“Upon further review with our records custodian, the use of the privilege of attorney work-product was not correct,” Jack D. Bajorek, deputy City Attorney, said in an email to Zansberg. “The correct privilege should have been ‘settlement negotiations.’”

Because the city had not discussed with CBZ Management’s attorney whether the emails were intended to be privileged, Bajorek released the emails, unredacted.

Jeff Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said that records requesters typically have to accept such denials “because they don’t have the legal resources to fight them.”

“It’s good to see Aurora acknowledge its mistake, but the unredacted records should have been provided to The Denver Gazette when the newspaper first requested them,” Roberts said in an email.

Roberts, whose group was formed in 1987 to promote the freedom of the press and open access to government, added: “It shouldn’t take a lawyer’s threat of a lawsuit for the city to realize that its citation of attorney-client privilege was improper.”