Credibility.

Credibility, it's a simple concept.  If you have no credibility, nothing you say means anything.  For instance, the three tellers in the Airways Auto Tag Agency maintain their innocence have no credibility when on the other end of the deal they have the chief of police's wife screaming that they stole tens of thousands of dollars.  As the guy behind this blog, I have no credibility either, whether you believe I target people that I have an ax to grind with or maybe I'm just making shit up cause I'm some disgruntled fool that was slighted by the legal system.  That's why when I make an accusation or try to tell a story, I back everything up, ad nauseum, with documents so there's no doubt what I'm saying is true.  Somehow though, when the state has a victim that's been clearly discredited and stripped of all credibility, they still stick by their victim while refusing to see the truth about what's going on.  Case in point, the protagonist in my first mortgage fraud story, Bernardo Barrera.


Mr. Barrera tells the cops, namely Detective Jorge Baluja then of the Miami Dade Mortgage Fraud Task Force, that his identity had been stolen and used in the commission of a massive mortgage fraud scheme.  Now on the surface this might of made some sort of sense but I dug through the evidence and found the following facts that severely undermined Mr. Barrera's credibility...

• Mr. Barrera had committed mortgage fraud during the purchase of his own home.
• Just month before his identity was allegedly stolen in this mortgage fraud, someone else had stolen his identity for another fraud that he'd forgotten to tell the police about.
• Citimortgage, the lender that funded the fraudulent scheme had sent several letters to Mr. Barrera at his primary residence regarding this fraudulent mortgage even before it was funded.

Those are just some of the facts that we'd found that should have given any detective or prosecutor pause before moving forward with such a backwards and screwed up case.  Most importantly though, after examining a copy of Mr. Barrera's credit report, I found that in the interim between the first instance of identity theft  and the second involving the fraudulent home purchase and mortgage, Mr. Barrera pays off all his credit cards!  We're not talking just a few hundred dollars, we're talking several thousand dollars, that should have stricken law enforcement as really bizarre as Mr. Barrera had been unemployed for nearly two years at that point.  How many people do you guys know that pay off all their credit cards when they're unemployed? 


The best part of this farce was that during depositions, Mr. Barrera made no secret of paying his credit cards off, he openly admitted to it and explained that he was able to do so because his ex-wife refinanced their marital home and for some reason or another gave him the proceeds of that transaction with which he decided to pay off all his loans.  Wonderful right?  This is where we get down to the credibility issue again, Mr. Barrera's credibility should already have been suspect at this point so why would law enforcement believe anything he says now?  His ex-wife's refinance and generous cash gift to Mr. Barrera is easy to prove, it's simply a matter of going over to the County Clerk's office and checking the public records, a quick search under her name, Maribel Barrera or her maiden name Maribel Zevallos, yields the following...

The Barrera's were divorced in 2006 and Mr. Barrera paid off all his credit cards between October 2007 and January 2008.  As you can see in this screen shot from the Clerk's office, there have been no new mortgages on their marital home since 2003 therefore completely invalidating Mr. Barrera's claims of paying off his credit cards with proceeds of his wife's refinancing of their former marital home therefore further stripping any and all credibility that Mr. Barrera may have had.


So here's my question, how can a man who's been proven time and time again to lie regarding the circumstances of this alleged fraud be taken seriously by law enforcement?  How could they create a case and arrest innocent people based on the testimony of a fraudster who we've proven has done nothing but lie every time he's given a statement?  How could law enforcement be blind to this seasoned con man's lies?  I've spent the last three plus years of my life trying to figure it out.  Isn't the cops job to find the truth?  Just how much bullshit can you feed these guys before they admit they fucked up and rectify their mistakes?  Isn't it ironic that they can build a case on total bullshit and lies then the defendants have to defend themselves with facts and the truth?


Perhaps this kind of crap could have worked decades ago when there wasn't a wealth of information available online like access to property records.  With this kind of information available at your fingertips, could anyone be stupid enough to lie about something like this to the cops?

"I had to get second mortgages on my house to keep the business going"

We'll investigate that claim tomorrow...