Fatima Mello, of East Providence, met Jennifer Willis, of West Warwick, due to their common experience with a woman whom Mello includes in the group she calls “seasoned manipulators.”

“They end up knowing how to play the system,” says Mello.

Mello and Willis are landlords. They each rent one apartment. And they have found that once a tenant is in, it is very difficult to get him or her out if he or she does not want to go.

“I’ve been to court 11 times with this tenant,” says Willis.

Mello was in court with the same tenant just last week. The courtroom is where the delay game is played out, where the landlord points to the lease and assorted violations and the tenant points to assorted hardships that allegedly make moving impossible. It can get silly sometimes. Credibility is often stretched to the limit and then some.

There are evictions ordered in District Court. And there are appeals of those evictions to Superior Court that sometimes allow a tenant to live rent free for weeks, even months.

Mello says she had been blessed as a landlord.

“I’d never had a problem with a tenant.”

Until now. Now, she has had that courtroom experience. She knows the strange feeling of living with a tenant who is in the same house and not paying rent.

“We ignore each other,” she says.

Perhaps the strangest and most long lasting case of “playing the system” continues in Exeter where Paul Kelly, an Iraq veteran, cannot get in or go near the cabin he owns near the Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery. A former girlfriend, Pocahontas Cooley, showed up back in the summer of 2007 claiming she had no place to stay. He let her stay at the cabin — temporarily. She is still there, claiming to be Kelly’s common-law wife. Kelly can’t go near his own home because of a no-contact order. He says he is definitely not Cooley’s husband.

Cooley was evicted in December 2007. She appealed and Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson has granted delay after delay in Superior Court. Kelly is living in his sister’s basement in Narragansett. He is paying the taxes and the mortgage on his cabin. He just can’t live there.

Neither Mello nor Willis has had quite as extreme a standoff with the people who live in their apartments. But they, too, have known the frustration of going to court, then going to court again.

Mello says her current tenant, who used to be Willis’ tenant, showed up last October claiming to have left her last apartment because of a foreclosure.

“She presents herself very well,” says Mello.

The problems started as soon as the woman moved in. The security deposit wasn’t paid. The rent was only partially paid. Mello took her tenant to court and the woman was evicted March 31. She appealed. Then she agreed to drop the appeal if she could stay until May 15.

So May 15, this Friday, is the day Mello is supposed to get her apartment back. Unless something else happens. She has not been paid any rent since February.

It was during one of her many trips to District Court that Mello asked a clerk if her tenant had a history of evictions. Yes, said the clerk. The tenant had had 10 different addresses since 1996.

“I started contacting the other landlords,” she says.

That’s how she met Willis. They compared notes and found a lot of similarities, including the story of foreclosure as the reason for leaving a previous apartment. They went to court together. They shared the stories of complicated evictions and the thousands of dollars they had to pay for lawyers and other expenses.

And there is, of course, the rent never paid. They receive little encouragement to go after a tenant for unpaid rent or property damages once that tenant is gone.

“She owes me $4,150,” says Mello. “I know I won’t see it.”

They want landlords to get together. They want to make some basic proposals, such as setting up a statewide Web site to check on a prospective tenant’s history of evictions.

They have established an e-mail address: rilandlordassociation@gmail.com.

Willis believes that when you get right down to the heart of the matter, what tenants who work the system really do is a lot more than just working the system.

“In a way, it’s stealing,” she says. “They’re using our apartment for months at a time, and they know that if they buy one month, they can get two or three for free.”

bkerr@projo.com