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Address: 2414 SE 41st Ave.
Year built: 1959
Square footage: 6,083
Market value: $1.6 million
Owners: Loprinzi Property LLC
Property tax owed: $33,948
How long it’s been delinquent: Since 2021
What those taxes could buy: 19 months of market-rate rent in Portland
Why it’s delinquent: No forwarding address for the tax bill
Loprinzi’s Gym in Southeast Portland is a place of Portland lore. Professional bodybuilder Sam Loprinzi opened the gym in the 1940s and ran it for over 50 years. Loprinzi’s longtime friend and fellow burly man Robert Hill purchased the business in 2014; he’d been working out there since 1965. That same day, in 2014, property records show Hill sold it to Loprinzi Property LLC, whose members include Hill and whose listed manager is his cousin and prominent Portland businessman, Gary Coe, according to public filings.
Loprinzi’s is no boutique gym with workout machines that defy common sense and a eucalyptus-scented lobby. Instead, Loprinzi’s has low ceilings and aged iron equipment, mostly free weights. Here, you will find a mostly male clientele—the type with big biceps and not so big ankles. It looks like a time capsule from the 1970s.
In 2014, Robert Hill, 68, who goes by Bob, told WW, “I always liked being the strongest one of all my friends, or the one who could outrun all of my friends.” (We had asked him how to stick to a New Year’s fitness resolution. He advocated chewing slowly, swearing off pasta, and walking briskly.)
Coe is partial owner of Speed’s Towing, an auto lien service company, and a car auction yard. He also owned Retriever Towing for many years. His son Michael now owns it and has for the past 10 years. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum sued Retriever earlier this year, alleging it partook in a pattern of illegal tows. Coe also ran for the Oregon Senate in 2012 as a Republican, but lost to then-state Sen. Mark Hass (D-Beaverton).
When reached by phone, Coe blamed the tax collectors.
“I have a lot of properties, and I’m almost positive those are paid. If that one didn’t get paid, and you say for two years, I’m going to guess that somebody didn’t send me a statement,” said Coe, who was in Arizona at the time. “I paid about $550,000 in property taxes in November. It’s just painful, painful, I’m telling you, painful.”
The Multnomah County tax assessor’s office tells WW that it has “no record of a mailing address change, but the statements have been returned (without a forwarding address) since 2019.”
Those statements were sent to Coe’s former home in the Southwest Hills, which he sold in the fall of 2020 for $1.1 million. At any rate, Multnomah County tax assessor Mike Vaughn tells WW there is no valid reason for not paying your taxes. “There’s nothing in law that allows someone to not pay their tax timely.”