BREAKING NEWS!

As we mentioned before the man the state alleges posed as Bernardo Barrera at the closing for the home that is at the center of our mortgage fraud story was never apprehended, worse still Detective Baluja never even looked for the impostor. Well, the Detective and the State Attorney refuse to solve that who done it, but not us here at the Straw Buyer! Through careful research we've been able to pick up a police sketch of the man who posed as Bernardo Barrera at the closing, here it is on the news from the other night...

Scary stuff folks! Doesn't it worry you that neither the police or Assistant State Attorney Bill Kostrzewski have ever made any effort to identify the impostor? Wouldn't it make sense to actually find and charge the man who was not only guilty of identity theft but was also an integral part of the "organized scheme to defraud?" Common sense right?

Moving right along, I came accross this article over the weekend, there's some strange coincidences in this article. There's a couple of things that strike me as strange, first we have ASA Bill Kostrzewski (oddly enough the same prosecutor whose prosecuting the Bernardo Barrera Mortgage Fraud Case) aligning himself with a bad cop (sound familiar?), I love this quote in particular regarding the bad cop...

"John is an intense guy. Whether it's a small or big case, he will see it to the end."

Funny, that reminds me of this quote Mr. Kostrzewski made regarding Detective Baluja right before he threw him under the bus (yes you read right Jorge)...

"He's young, but he means well..."

Oh, OK! Detective Baluja can blunder his way through an investigation, fabricate evidence and suborn perjury as well as perjure himself, but it's OK because he's young and "means well." Super! I'm sure a jury is going to love to hear that! The other strange coincidence is the date the story was published, did any of the astute readers among you pick up on that?

The saddest part of that story comes in the form of this quote from one of the people targeted by the dirty cop and the state attorney's office at the conclusion of the article...

"My wife left me because of this mess," he says during a recent meeting in his living room. "She couldn't take it. We lost everything."

He insists they are not criminals — despite the claims in Kostrzewski's 2004 memo. "After three, four years, they found nothing," Degrave says. "What proof do they have? None. There is no price on what I have lost."

That's heartbreaking. The criminal justice system wore the victims (defendants) down to the point of taking a plea, whether because of personal or financial reasons regardless of guilt or innocence. The sad part of this scenario is that a defendant has a finite amount of resources to fight criminal charges, on the other hand the state has infinite resources and dirty tricks at their disposal to make a prosecution, justified or not. More often than not a defendant (even an innocent one) has to take a plea to get out from under an overzealous prosection. That my friends is a bigger crime than anything we've discussed to date.

Anyone want to hear the most incredible swine flu story? If so, let me know, I promise a chuckle over this one...