So Your Landlord's Got a Knife. Well, Get in Line and Take a Number.

San Francisco Tenants Union head Ted Gullicksen agrees that you don't see that everyday. But, then again, you're not him. And he sees stuff like this more often than you'd think.

Asking Gullicksen -- who's been doing this since 1988 -- for his best "crazy landlord stories" would be like asking Wilt Chamberlain about the most flexible women he's met. But a few extreme cases do stick out in his mind:

• When the City Attorney finally decided to throw the book at Citi Apartments, it probably weighed about 10 pounds. No joke -- this lawsuit is 276 pages long. But you can skip to page 32 to read about the Citi employees dressed in full military fatigues and wearing sidearms who multiple tenants claim knocked on their doors and demanded to be let in. "Citi did so much harassment that this was usually just one paragraph in a long story," says Gullicksen.

• Two words: "Blood and feces."

• And, finally, who could forget San Francisco's "landlords from hell," accused of, among other transgressions, hacking the joists supporting a tenant's floor, hacking a tenant's e-mail account, breaking into their tenants' apartments, stealing things, and dousing tenants' property with ammonia (but no blood and feces).

These are the highlights -- or lowlights -- on the tip of Gullicksen's tongue. What happens more often than knife- or feces-wielding landlords are landlords who walk right into renters' apartments and think nothing of it. "We get a real steady stream of people who are pretty severely harassed by their landlords, who walk in in the middle of the night or while [tenants] are in the shower," says Gullicksen. The law, by the way, requires a 24-hour advance notice in writing.

"A few weeks ago, a landlord set up a Webcam in a tenant's apartment. And when the tenant turned it off, the landlord came in the apartment and threatened the tenant physically," claimed Gullicksen.

Of cousre, that incident didn't make the police report. Gullicksen said the cops were called -- but refused to take any action.