“I’ve got this client, they are away from their home,” said Matt Weidner, a foreclosure defense attorney in St. Petersburg, Florida. “They come home to find a dude in there hacking their goddamn house apart. There’s a hammer sitting in the wall, like they said fuck it, we’re done for the day, we’ll just shove this in here.” The partially demolished home has sat that way for three years, amid litigation.
The few remaining defenders of the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute the executives who helped cause the 2008 financial crisis argue that the bankers’ actions were unethical but not criminal. President Obama himself has made this claim: “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street … wasn’t illegal,” he told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes in December 2011.
The president might want to take this up with David Adier, who says he was victimized by Wells Fargo breaking and entering into his family’s home in Morris Township, New Jersey, and then committing property damage and theft. Burglary is a felony subject to prison time — if anybody but a bank does it.
Adier’s case is doubly disturbing because of what was taken: items his father retrieved from his family’s apartment in France before fleeing the Nazis in 1940, including a Kiddush cup, a Seder plate and a sewing machine used by his grandmother.
