If His Lips Are Moving, He's Lying: The Danger of an Unmonitored Proxy Landlord.
Complaint concerning Richard “Rick” Neumann, BCA paperwork, tenant safety, and the consequences of leaving tenants under the control of an absent property owner’s proxy. Neumann is regarded as the property contact and power. In nearly three years of renting I've never met the owner Don Klyberg
If his lips are moving, he's lying.
That is the conclusion this record forces tenants to confront when examining the statements of Richard Neumann, also known as Rick Newmann, a live-in proxy landlord whose own documentation provides a disturbing picture of how he communicates, how aggressively he responds to scrutiny, and how confidently he can present a version of events that conflicts with the documentary record.
Neumann's BCA paperwork is particularly revealing.
While responding to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Neumann uses vulgar and aggressive language while claiming that he has not had complaints for 25 years. Yet the paperwork itself indicates that Neumann was registered approximately 19 years ago. Complaints concerning his conduct have also been made since December 5, 2023.
That contradiction matters.
It demonstrates more than a disagreement over dates. It demonstrates the degree of confidence with which Neumann is willing to make a sweeping claim to an official agency while the available paperwork provides a basis for challenging that claim.
And that is precisely what makes his theatrics dangerous.
A person who can present an aggressively worded, demonstrably questionable narrative to the BCA can potentially make that same narrative sound convincing to an absent property owner, a neighbor, another tenant, or anyone else who has no independent access to what is actually happening inside the property.
The Proxy Problem
This is where ownership responsibility becomes critical.
When an owner is absent from a property and simply trusts the word of a live-in proxy landlord, tenants can be left in an extraordinarily vulnerable position.
Neumann is not simply someone who occasionally communicates with tenants. According to the circumstances described in the evidence accompanying this complaint, he has occupied a position of authority over tenants while maintaining master-key access to tenant units and access to tenant mailboxes.
That combination of authority and physical access demands accountability.
Tenants should not have to live under the fear that the person controlling access to their home can also control the story being told to the owner about what happens there.
The danger becomes even more serious when that individual has a documented criminal-registration history and when tenants report threatening, aggressive, or abusive interactions.
An absent owner cannot responsibly outsource the entire reality of a residential property to one person and then treat that person's account as unquestionable fact.
What Neumann's Own Documentation Shows
The most important evidence in this complaint does not come from rumor.
It comes from Neumann's own documentation.
Viewers can examine the language for themselves.
The vulgarity, aggression, and theatrical nature of the response are part of the record. So is the claim concerning 25 years without complaints. So is the documentation concerning the approximately 19-year registration period. And so are the complaints dating back to December 5, 2023.
The question is therefore not simply whether tenants like Neumann.
The question is whether the documentation demonstrates a person who should be treated as a reliable and unsupervised authority over vulnerable tenants.
The evidence raises serious concerns that it does not.
When Complaints Cannot Even Reach the Scene
Another central issue raised by the evidence is the repeated reporting of attacks and threatening conduct to police.
Multiple subjects have reported incidents involving Neumann, yet police have reportedly refused to dispatch to the scene in circumstances where tenants were seeking intervention.
That creates a devastating accountability gap.
If a person repeatedly reports that something dangerous is happening but authorities do not come to the property, the absence of a police report or police intervention cannot reasonably be treated as proof that nothing happened.
It can instead mean that the system failed to document what was reported.
That distinction is fundamental.
A lack of police response is not the same thing as a lack of an incident.
And when the person controlling the property is then able to tell the owner that there are supposedly no problems, the tenant can become trapped between an absent landlord, an empowered proxy, and an enforcement system that never arrives.
From Gossip to Isolation
The complaint also concerns what tenants describe as triangulated gossip and false narratives involving multiple people.
According to the evidence accompanying this complaint, these narratives have been associated with life-threatening break-ins, multi-party targeted attacks, communal isolation, and continuing rental disputes with the property owner.
This is how an emotionally abusive living environment can develop.
A tenant does not necessarily have to be physically attacked every day to live in fear. The constant uncertainty—who has been told what, who believes whom, who has access to the building, whether a complaint will be answered, whether police will respond, and whether the owner will believe the tenant or the proxy—can itself become a mechanism of control.
Neumann's own communications allow viewers to see the character of these interactions rather than relying solely on a tenant's description of them.
The Larger Minnesota Housing Problem
The circumstances described here also raise a broader question about residential housing in Minnesota: what happens when tenants are effectively dependent upon a proxy landlord who controls the property while the actual owner remains physically absent?
Who monitors the proxy?
Who verifies tenant complaints?
Who checks whether master keys are being used appropriately?
Who protects tenant mail?
Who independently investigates reports of threats or property attacks?
Who ensures that the owner hears the tenant's account rather than only the proxy's account?
And who intervenes when the tenant has no practical way to leave?
These questions become particularly urgent when tenants are already financially and emotionally depleted.
The allegation raised here is not merely that one landlord behaved badly.
It is that an entire arrangement can leave tenants vulnerable when ownership, housing authorities, social services, law enforcement, and other institutions each assume that somebody else is responsible for monitoring what happens inside the property.
Meanwhile, the tenant is the person who bears the consequences.
Who Gets Paid While the Tenant Pays the Price?
The evidence and allegations presented with this complaint raise an even larger concern about institutional accountability.
The tenant's health, income, safety, housing stability, and freedom can be consumed while institutions and property interests continue operating around the tenant.
Where government agencies, housing authorities, property owners, law enforcement, and other organizations each have a role in the housing system, the tenant should not become the only person without power.
A tenant should not have to prove their own victimization repeatedly simply because the person controlling the property has provided a more convenient story.
Nor should the absence of a police dispatch be transformed into evidence that an incident did not occur.
The Central Question
The central question is remarkably simple:
Why is Richard Neumann being trusted to speak for a property and its tenants when his own documentation contains aggressive language and statements about his complaint history that are contradicted by the documentation available in the record?
If Neumann can tell the BCA that he has had no complaints for 25 years despite documentation raising questions about that claim and complaints dating back to December 5, 2023, what confidence should an absent property owner have in everything else Neumann tells them?
And if the owner continues to rely on Neumann's word without independently monitoring the property, who is actually protecting the tenants?
That is the danger.
The issue is not simply whether Neumann is unpleasant.
It is whether tenants are being left with an individual who has authority, physical access, keys, access to mailboxes, and the ability to shape the narrative presented to the property's owner and outside authorities—while tenants reporting problems struggle to have those problems independently investigated.
If his lips are moving, he's lying may sound like rhetoric.
But when the speaker's own paperwork supplies the evidence needed to question his claims, the phrase becomes a warning about credibility, accountability, and tenant safety.
And the evidence is available for viewers to examine for themselves.
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