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A former Berkeley mayoral candidate and his wife, a three-time City Council candidate, went to court Thursday to fight for their home. 

Michael Delacour, his wife Gina Sasso and their teenage son, have been threatened with eviction from their ground floor flat at 2223 San Pablo Ave., where they have lived for 11 years. 

Their landlord, William Curry III, who lives upstairs, recently filed a three-day eviction notice charging the family with 17 violations of their lease. 

Curry alleges that Delacour and Sasso have sold marijuana from the apartment, operated an unlicensed bicycle business, harassed other tenants, purposely littered the shared yard and failed to clean up after their dog. 

“For the last three years they have been causing all kinds of problems,” said Curry.  

Sasso, who unsuccessfully ran for the 2nd District City Council seat in 1992, 1994 and 2000, and sat on the city’s Commission on Labor in the late 1990s, said the landlord’s charges were untrue. 

“We are certified to smoke marijuana,” she said, adding that they are allowed to smoke for medical reasons. She said they do not sell drugs and that the only money exchange that took place on the property was a $10 sale of her brother’s bike.  

Curry maintains that the couple has fixed up hundreds of bicycles and that they leave spare parts in his trash bin. 

Delacour, who has lived in Berkeley for 37 years and co-founded the Peoples’ Park movement in 1968, said the landlord has been trying to kick the family out since the end of rent control in 1998. 

“Think about it,” he said. “If Gina (who is 40 years old) never moves, he knows that would cost him about $500,000 in rent money.” 

The couple pays $790 monthly for rent, but the market value of the unit is far higher. 

Sasso knows Curry from before they lived at the property, but the relationship between them has grown increasingly bitter. 

The couple accuses Curry of harassing the family into vacating the apartment. “He has poisoned our plants,” Delacour said.  

In retaliation the couple staged a protest. 

“We picketed in front of the house and put ‘William Curry has to go’ flyers on our car and street posts,” said Sasso. The couple later held an anti-Curry rally at their home. 

They believe the eviction charges are Curry’s attempt to get back at them for the protests. 

Curry denied all charges of harassment and called the couple’s protests, “another piece of an unreasonable situation.” 

The trial in Alameda County Superior Court began on Thursday and is scheduled to continue next week.