Matt Weidner – Fighting For The American People

Posts Tagged ‘mother jones’

All across this country legislators and policy makers are discussing the Fraudclosure Crisis.  The suits are there from the banks and the foreclosure mills.  Policy wonks are there from think tanks and universities, but the people who are most directly impacted by all of this are excluded.  Here in this state our legislators are meeting and they’ll hear from all the usual suspects…but are consumers ever invited to tell their side of the story?

You will get your chance on March 9, 2011 when we hold the 2nd Annual Rally in Tallahassee.  We want to see thousands of homeowners in the state capitol telling your legislators how Fraudclosuregate has personally impacted you.  And now the Mother Jones Article….

After 18 months and more than 700 sworn testimonies, Congress’ Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrapped up its hearings last September with three unscheduled witnesses—a last-minute plea from a lawyer got them included, for five minutes each, at the tail end of the commission’s hearing in Sacramento.

A relative helped 79-year-old Lovie Hollis to the microphone. She testified (pdf) that she and her husband Grafton had raised five daughters in their Sacramento home and had paid off their mortgage but had to sell in 2006 when Grafton could no longer get up the stairs. She did not understand the terms on their new home and was unable to pay when the monthly rate suddenly adjusted upward to nearly three times the original mortgage. She answered an ad offering loan modification help. “Tom” operated out of an office in Hollis’s neighborhood. He told her to stop making loan payments while he worked on her case, took her money (and her car), and fled. Hollis, now a widow, lost her home.

Mother Jones Here

One of the many, many dirty secrets that will come out about all this foreclosure fraud that is burning across this country is the fact that the Good Old Uncle Sam is not only right smack dab in the middle of it, but that your federal government signed off and is in fact paying the massive profits the purveyors of all the fraud are making.

It’s no secret that the federal government, through Fannie and Freddie are the real owners of a huge percentage of the mortgages that are being foreclosed on.  The Plaintiff name may be Aurora or Litton or Bank of America or the IXIS 2003 Loan Trust, but when the Certificate of Title is issued or the bid assigned or the real interest in the property is conveyed, we will all be blown away when we discover just how many times the real party in interest is Uncle Sam.  I am convinced that this fact is concealed because what would this country (or the rest of the world) think about the federal government coming to take your home or 260,000 homes across the State of Florida? And yet that is exactly what is happening.

There is one other key fact in all of this.  The federal government largely determines what law firms will be responsible for filing the foreclosure lawsuits that have now choked our courts through their designation of the law firms that are permitted to institute the foreclosure actions.  Now that these firms are under investigation by the Florida Attorney General’s office, you’d think the federal government would step right up and take some action against these firms or at least look into their conduct right?  Wrong.

Have a look at the attached article that appears in Mother Jones.

Please read the letters that are attached to the request.  Think long and hard about what all this means.  I’ve given up hope that our judges and elected leaders have any motivation to address these problems on their own initiative.  Our only hope is that journalists will put the massive amount of time and resources that are necessary into researching and telling this story in a way that exposes all the levels of corruption that exist.

I really believe that only the press can save us now.  Please support those in our press who are telling this story by commenting and sharing the stories they are telling.  Please “share” the stories and links on Facebook and emails so that their editors can see that these issues are of interest to readers.

This letter comes not from the passionate advocates battling against the abuses of the mills, but from three members of the United States Congress.  How can our judges continue to ignore the issues raised in the letter?

congress

Please also read this important national article on the shame that is occurring in Florida Foreclosure Courtrooms.

Mother Jones

Congratulations to Ice Legal for really being on the front lines of the fight to ensure basic rights and the rules of the courts are respected and thanks to Mike Dillon for the early morning heads up on the story.

Now the national media is picking up on what all of us have known for far too long…..the rich foreclosure barons are shoveling in millions of dollars and abusing courts and homeowners in the process.

One of my questions is how courts can continue to sanction the conduct reported in this article?  How can our federally-backed lenders and servicers continue to sanction such conduct?  It’s a terrifying commentary on what our country has become when the conduct reported in this article has become so institutionalized that it’s widely accepted.  We should all be reminded that this fight we’re in is a fight for the very heart and soul of this country and our courts.  There are judges that “get it”.  (Note that one of Pinellas County’s great judges Hon. Anthony Rondolino is quoted prominently in the article.)  There is a small but growing band of activists that are sounding the alarm bells.

Let’s just hope this evil fire gets extinguished before we reach a point of catastrophic no return….if we have not already.

Read on.  Visit the Mother Jones website for the full story.

— Illustration: Lou Beach

How the federal housing agencies—and some of the biggest bailed-out banks—are helping shady lawyers make millions by pushing families out of their homes.

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A Florida notary’s stamp is valid for four years, and its expiration date is visible on the imprint. But here in front of Ice were dozens of assignments notarized with stamps that hadn’t even existed until months—in some cases nearly a year—after the foreclosures were filed. Which meant Stern’s people were foreclosing first and doing their legal paperwork later. In effect, it also meant they were lying to the court—an act that could get a lawyer disbarred or even prosecuted. “There’s no question that it’s pervasive,” says Tom Ice of the backdated documents—nearly two dozen of which were verified by Mother Jones. “We’ve found tons of them.”

This all might seem like a legal technicality, but it’s not. The faster a foreclosure moves, the more difficult it is for a homeowner to fight it—even if the case was filed in error. In March, upon discovering that Stern’s firm had fudged an assignment of mortgage in another case, a judge in central Florida’s Pasco County dismissed the case with prejudice—an unusually harsh ruling that means it can never again be refiled. “The execution date and notarial date,” she wrote in a blunt ruling, “were fraudulently backdated, in a purposeful, intentional effort to mislead the defendant and this court.”

More often than not in uncontested cases, missing or problematic documents simply go overlooked. In Florida, where foreclosure cases must go before a judge (some states handle them as a bureaucratic matter), dwindling budgets and soaring caseloads have overwhelmed local courts. Last year, the foreclosure dockets of Lee County in southwest Florida became so clogged that the court initiated rapid-fire hearings lasting less than 20 seconds per case—”the rocket docket,” attorneys called it. In Broward County, the epicenter of America’s housing bust, the courthouse recently began holding foreclosure hearings in a hallway, a scene that local attorneys call the “new Broward Zoo.” “The judges are so swamped with this stuff that they just don’t pay attention,” says Margery Golant, a veteran Florida foreclosure defense lawyer. “They just rubber-stamp them.”

But the Ices had uncovered what looked like a pattern, so Tom booked a deposition with Stern’s top deputy, Cheryl Samons, and confronted her with the backdated documents—including two from cases her firm had filed against Ice Legal’s clients. Samons, whose counsel was present, insisted that the filings were just a mistake. She refused to elaborate, so the Ices moved to depose the notaries and other Stern employees whose names were on the evidence. On the eve of those depositions, however, the firm dropped foreclosure proceedings against the Ices’ clients.

It was a bittersweet victory: The Ices had won their cases, but Stern’s practices remained under wraps. “This was done to cover up fraud,” Tom fumes. “It was done precisely so they could try to hit a reset button and keep us from getting the real goods.”

Backdated documents, according to a chorus of foreclosure experts, are typical of the sort of shenanigans practiced by a breed of law firms known as “foreclosure mills.” While far less scrutinized than subprime lenders or Wall Street banks, these firms undermine efforts by government and the mortgage industry to put struggling homeowners back on track at a time of record foreclosures. (There were 2.8 million foreclosures in 2009, and 3.8 million are projected for this year.) The mills think “they can just change things and make it up to get to the end result they want, because there’s no one holding them accountable,” says Prentiss Cox, a foreclosure expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. “We’ve got these people with incentives to go ahead with foreclosures and flood the real estate market.”

Stern’s is hardly the only outfit to attract criticism, but his story is a useful window into the multibillion-dollar “default services” industry, which includes both law firms like Stern’s and contract companies that handle paper-pushing tasks for other big foreclosure lawyers. Over the past decade and a half, Stern has built up one of the industry’s most powerful operations—a global machine with offices in Florida, Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—squeezing profits from every step in the foreclosure process. Among his loyal clients, who’ve sent him hundreds of thousands of cases, are some of the nation’s biggest (and, thanks to American taxpayers, most handsomely bailed out) banks—including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. “A lot of these mills are doing the same kinds of things,” says Linda Fisher, a professor and mortgage-fraud expert at Seton Hall University’s law school. But, she added, “I’ve heard some pretty bad stories about Stern from people in Florida.”

While the mortgage fiasco has so far cost American homeowners an estimated $7 trillion in lost equity, it has made Stern (no relation to NBA commissioner David J. Stern) fabulously rich. His $15 million, 16,000-square-foot mansion occupies a corner lot in a private island community on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. It is featured on a water-taxi tour of the area’s grandest estates, along with the abodes of Jay Leno and billionaire Blockbuster founder Wayne Huizenga, as well as the former residence of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. (Last year, Stern snapped up his next-door neighbor’s property for $8 million and tore down the house to make way for a tennis court.) Docked outside is Misunderstood, Stern’s 130-foot, jet-propelled Mangusta yacht—a $20 million-plus replacement for his previous 108-foot Mangusta. He also owns four Ferraris, four Porsches, two Mercedes-Benzes, and a Bugatti—a high-end Italian brand with models costing north of $1 million a pop.

Despite his immense wealth and ability to affect the lives of ordinary people, Stern operates out of the public eye. His law firm has no website, he is rarely mentioned in the mainstream business press, and neither he nor several of his top employees responded to repeated interview requests for this story. Stern’s personal attorney, Jeffrey Tew, also declined to comment. But scores of interviews and thousands of pages of legal and financial filings, internal emails, and other documents obtained by Mother Jones provided insight into his operation. So did eight of Stern’s former employees—attorneys, paralegals, and other staffers who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. (Most still work in related fields and fear that speaking publicly about their ex-boss could harm their careers.)

For the rest of the article, click here.