Matt Weidner – Fighting With The American People

Posts Tagged ‘tom ice’

Tom Ice and Ice Legal have been fighting this battle longer than just about anyone….following is a great article in Reuters….

Reuters

Foreclosure defense attorneys and advocates have known if for a very long time….ICE LEGAL in West Palm Beach, Florida is one of the best foreclosure defense firms in the country.
The work they produce and their advocacy on behalf of homeowners and in support of the very real principles of equity, justice and fairness is second to none.

And now the rest of the world knows it.  The press has now picked up on the very real fraud that is occurring in our foreclosure courtrooms.  Read the very powerful juxtaposition between the good work Ice does and the way unrepresented homeowners get creamed in foreclosure court…..

WALL STREET JOURNAL ARTICLE HERE

The Jeffrey Stephan fiasco is just the beginning.  We are only becoming aware of the GREATEST FINANCIAL FRAUD EVER COMMITTED ON A SOCIETY because committed and dedicated attorneys stood up for their clients, remembered the oath they took when they became attorneys then they’ve continued working against impossible odds for years.  April Charney has long been on the forefront of this battle and she’s responsible for educating more attorneys in this state in this fight than any other.  Tom and Arianne Ice from Ice Legal have long produced the finest work and are training the best foreclosure fighters in this state.  There’s another superstar in this battle and while I don’t know him, his name is Thomas A. Cox from Maine.  Cox brought us one of the two important Jeffrey Stephan depositions, and now his case brings us…THE MOST IMPORTANT FORECLOSURE ORDER I’VE SEEN YET!

The fallout being reported across the country is just the beginning.  This site really is a blueprint for understanding this crisis and it includes some of the most important documents that judges, press, regulators and advocates need to understand the issues that will cause us all to suffer for decades.

THE BANKS DO NOT WANT YOU TO SEE THIS DOCUMENT

THE BANKS HAVE ASKED THE COURT TO SEAL THIS DOCUMENT.

THE ENTIRE MORTGAGE SERVICING INDUSTRY IS GOING TO GO BALLISTIC ONCE THIS ORDER GETS OUT THERE AND IS WIDELY DISTRIBUTED

THAT’S WHY IT’S SO IMPORTANT THAT YOU SIT DOWN AND READ THE DOCUMENT ATTACHED BELOW SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY……(AND SHARE IT WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS)

StephanProtectiveOrder

We’re all struggling to see just how deep the Jeffrey Stephan rabbit hole goes, but one thing is certain…it extends far beyond FDLG and GMAC.  I’m waiting for my Rule 4.33 notices from all the other foreclosure mills that have relied upon those affidavits.

AND TO ALL THOSE JUDGES WHO WILL BE GRANTING SUMMARY JUDGMENT BASED ON THIS FLAWED EVIDENCE TODAY AND NEXT WEEK AND LATER…DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS?

The national press now has this issue in a very big way.  Remember that lawyers like Tom Ice and Chris Immell from Ice Legal have been screaming about this for months but judges, who are supposed to know the law, apply the law and care about the law, have been objecting to the very issue that is now splashed across the pages of national media.  Ice Legal gets a huge amount of credit for this incredible development that will send shock waves through the entire foreclosure community.  And still our judges don’t seem to care…..

washingtonpost

Examples of the Affidavits that are in question….

Stephanaffidavits

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.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

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.

Far and above the finest, most aggressive and most principled foreclosure lawyers in this state are the attorneys working at Ice Legal in West Palm Beach, Florida.  Next to the nationally respected pioneer in foreclosure defense, April Charney from Jacksonville Legal Aid, no single group of lawyers has done more to advance the cause of foreclosure defense and to protect the core and substantive rights of consumers than Tom Ice and the fantastic lawyers he has working with him.

The members of the Ethical and Principled Foreclosure Defense Bar, consumers and indeed all across this state have benefited immeasurably because of the exceptional legal work they have produced.  If you’ve had a chance to review any of their pleadings or taken the time to read any of the numerous depositions they’ve taken, you should appreciate the attention to detail, the crisp and clean nature of the pleadings and the precision of their application of the law to the unique facts of the case.

With all that being said, as a member of the Ethical and Principled Foreclosure Defense Bar, I am frankly deeply troubled by reports I hear on a regular basis that seem to suggest some courtrooms across this state are leaning too much in favor of “pushing through this foreclosure crisis” than carefully considering the important ethical, social and jurisprudential consequences of sloppy, inaccurate or fraudulent legal work.  So called “Rocket Docket” or “Foreclosure Gas Chambers” that have been set up in circuits across the state are ratifying and confirming the development of institutionalized processes and procedures that encourage the production of sloppy, inaccurate and potentially fraudulent legal work product.

The bottom line is this, if the foreclosure mills know their cases and evidence submitted will not be subject to the kind of proper judicial scrutiny that cases involving the confiscation of a consumers home should be subject to, will they cut ethical and legal corners that they would not otherwise cut?

In my mind, the answer is clearly yes.  I am quite certain that when the Millionaire Foreclosure Mills produce their work product, they pay particular attention to getting their facts right when submitting cases and evidence before the judges of the sixth, twelfth and thirteenth judicial circuit, courtrooms which are known to be presided over by judges who are tough, focused on details and facts and holding the lawyers that practice before them to the highest ethical and professional standards.  There are certainly other circuits in this state of which the same can be said, but I know this about these circuits based on my first hand experience.

Which brings us back to the unusual and troubling circumstances we hear reported about in other areas of the state, particularly South Florida and particularly Palm Beach County.  The dockets are particularly crushing in those areas, but we must remember that each case represents just one person or just one family.  That 84 year old sick woman, or that illiterate migrant worker that is a defendant in a foreclosure case should not be affected by the “foreclosure crisis”. Indeed his or her Constitutional rights must be zealously protected the Court Sitting in Equity just as if this were the only case pending before the court.

Which brings us back to the comments about the detailed and exceptional work produced by Ice Legal.  I attach here an example of the kind of work produced by them.  I encourage all advocates, and especially members of the Bar and Bench, to read and consider the matters asserted in the motion carefully.  I urge us all to consider that everytime we step into a courtroom, whether it be for a small claims case, a death penalty case or a terrorist trial, the same rules and principles apply. That imposing and awe-inspiring court shown above should be in each of our minds every time we step into a courtroom and we should all be asking ourselves, how would these learned judges sitting below view my conduct in this case?  And with that in mind, I urge each to read the attached motion:

Motion for Disqualification