Two City of Miami firefighters convicted of mortgage fraud yet two drastically different sentences...

Perhaps a strange coincidence or possibly something else going on?  Two veteran City of Miami firefighters engaged in massive mortgage fraud conspiracies, former assistant fire chief Veldora Arthur and firefighter Thomas Thelusma, both federally indicted.  Ms. Arthur goes to trial and loses while Mr. Thelusma decides to cut a deal with the government.  While Ms Arthur's mortgage fraud scheme was far greater than Mr. Thelusma's, there seems to be some disparity in their sentences.


As we discussed back in March, Ms Arthur was able to get away without paying back a single dollar to the banks that she defrauded, in case you missed it, here's her restitution order again...

Veldora Arthur Restitution Order

Rather shocking isn't it?  Despite having defrauded several banks out of millions of dollars, somehow Ms Arthur doesn't have to pay them back?!  No restitution whatsoever!  That's all well and good till one of our readers left us this comment last week...

Thomas Thelusma was sentenced and ordered to pay $1,035,000.00 for restitution! That must be some good ***** she has. Did she **** and **** everyone?? 

HUH?  How the hell could that be?  I pulled up Mr. Thelusma's sentencing order and found the following...

Thomas Thelusma Judgement

As I expected, Mr. Thelusma has to pay back the banks that he defrauded to the tune of $1,035,000!

I don't get it, every other convicted mortgage fraudster that we've written about has had to pay the banks they ripped off back.  Joe Guaracino from the Plantation Cops case has to pay the banks back upwards of three million, John Romney from the Bernardo Barrera case, over half a million, etc.  


You have to ask how the hell did Veldora Arthur get away without having to pay the banks back while these other guys are going to be saddled with this debt for the rest of their lives?

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time...

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That's an easy enough proposition, isn't it?  When you're considering participating in some nefarious activity, go ahead and do a quick cost benefit analysis and determine if you can handle the jail time for the crime you're about to commit.  Simple.  I'm sure we've all posed that question to ourselves at some point or another, how much money would justify going to jail for?  Maybe a million bucks?  Perhaps half a million for a year behind bars?  Who knows.


That brings us to the mastermind behind the first mortgage fraud caper we discussed on our blog, none other than John Arthur Romney.  For those of you who aren't acquainted with Mr. Romney, back in 2008 Mr. Romney masterminded a mortgage fraud scheme where he purchased a home then a week or so later through the use of a straw buyer, flipped it for a tidy $400k profit.  Not bad for a weeks work, right?  Problems arose for Mr. Romney when his straw buyer claimed that he had nothing to do with the transaction and in fact his identity was stolen in the commission of this fraud.  We have our doubts about those claims from the alleged straw buyer as the evidence seems to indicate that he was indeed involved in the fraud.  Regardless, back in February of 2011, Mr. Romney took a plea and admitted to his role in the fraud and subsequently was sentenced to 30 months in prison along with another ten years worth of probation.  In our humble opinion, that seemed like a slap on the wrist considering that after a few minutes playing around online we were able to find several other frauds that Mr. Romney was involved in, not to mention the fact that we're told that Mr. Romney had told law enforcement and the prosecutors about tons of other frauds that he had conducted.  

That's all well and good, at least 30 months behind bars is better than what almost all of the other fraudsters that the heralded Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud Task Force prosecuted got, we were unable to find anyone that got anything more than probation despite millions of dollars worth of fraud that they were found guilty of!  No worries, at least the state got Mr. Romney's case right, that is until a couple of nights back when I was checking in on Mr. Romney's whereabouts in the state prison system.  From his department of corrections page...

The department of correction's page states that Mr. Romney is at the Opa Locka W.R.C. and that his "Current Custody" is "community".  I did a little digging and found out that "W.R.C." stands for "Work Release Center".  WTF?!

Isn't that wonderful?  Mr Romney is out on the street!  He gets to run around all day then come back to a tax payer funded bed at night!  SWEET!!!  

So is that it?  Admit to stealing nearly $400k and all you get is less than 10 months behind bars?  Let's go back to the title of today's post...

"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time..."

With that in mind, let's do a quick cost benefit analysis.  Let's assume that he stole $400k and that he was behind bars for exactly ten months for ease of calculation.  That works out to $40k per month or approximately $1,300 per day.  How many of you guys our there are making $1,300 per day?  Considering our current economic climate, I'd venture to guess that not many of us are doing so.  Remember, this doesn't even take into consideration the other real estate/mortgage frauds that Mr. Romney has admitted to.  Add those numbers in and his average take per day could go up ten fold. 

I'll leave you with this, do you guys believe nine months behind bars was an adequate punishment for defrauding a bank out of $400k?  $40k per month while being fed and clothed by the state doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all, does it?

Five more minutes and a $1,080,000 later...

We left off last week demonstrating how we could find a massive mortgage fraud case with a bare minimum of effort and about five minutes of searching on the Miami Dade County Recorders office.  First we did a quick search and found a warranty deed for a property purchased by convicted mortgage fraudster John Arthur Romney through his company "Property Collateral". 

After examining the deed we were able to conclude that although the deed wasn't recorded till over four years later, the actual transaction had occurred on November 21, 2006.  Through the cost of the documentary stamps, we were able to deduce that the purchase price of the home in question was $755,000 and since we were not able to find a recorded mortgage for the purchase of this property by Property Collateral Inc, we can only assume that it was a cash purchase.

Next we found that there was a lis pendens filed on the property on November 4, 2009 which signaled the beginning of a foreclosure action against the property.  What struck us as strange was that although the company that purchased the property for what we presumed was all cash, they were still named in the foreclosure action.  The property was purchased on November 21, 2006 for all cash yet they're still named in a foreclosure suit?  We then searched for mortgages on the property by using the names of the other people named in the foreclosure suit and found that there was another lis pendens filed against the property, this one on September 22, 2008, a little more than year before the first one was filed.  Even worse now, two different lis pendens on the property and still no recorded mortgage!  Once again we attempt to search using the names of the other people named in the foreclosure suit for the subject property when we stumble upon this...

Here we find two mortgages recorded on the same day June 4, 2007 for the same property for a borrower named Leonor Essonreid.  Interesting?  Let's summarize what we have at this point...

• John Romney aka Property Collateral, Inc. purchases subject property located at 911 Columbus Blvd for $755,000 on November 21, 2006 for what we presume is all cash since there is no recorded mortgage.
• Mortgage is recorded against the property on June 4, 2007 naming Leonor Essonreid as the borrower even though there is no record of the ownership of the property being transferred to her.
• Lis pendens filed against the property on September 22, 2008.
• A second lis pendens filed against the property on November 21, 2009.
• A deed filed on August 3, 2010 conveying ownership of the property from Raul Romero to Property Collateral, Inc. even though the documents were originally signed four years earlier on Novermber 21, 2006.

With me so far or does the time line not make any sense to you?  It's not supposed to but a quick look at Leonor Essonreid's mortgages should explain everything.  Here are the first two pages of the first mortgage, as always, click on the image to enlarge it...

Did anyone catch it?  Even though the mortgage for reasons that can't be explained was recorded on June 4, 2007, the actual closing took place on November 21, 2006!  Who would have guessed it?!  Also note on page two that the amount of the mortgage was $880,000.  As if that wasn't bad enough, take a look at the second mortgage for the same property...

Brilliant, another mortgage recorded on the same day as the first for an additional $200,000 bringing the total amount borrowed against this property to $1,080,000.

I'm sure the astute among you have already realized that John Romney aka Property Collateral, Inc didn't purchase this property for cash on November 21, 2006.  What happened here was that the lender had already funded the loan for Leonor Essonreid in the amount of $1,080,000 and the attorney who was handling the closing had the money sitting in their trust account.  As soon as the money was available, the attorney paid the original seller of the property ($755,000), prepared a deed for the transfer of the property to John Romney aka Property Collateral who simultaneously sold the property to Leonor Essonreid whose loan proceeds were used to fund the entire fraud.  At the end of the day a deed was never recorded conveying the property to Ms. Essonreid, after all what was the point?  I'm sure Ms Essonreid had no interest in the property other than what came along with her role as a straw buyer, since the entire deal was a scam, why would the closing agent worry about recording a deed?  When all was said and done, Mr Romney and his co conspirators in this seven figure fraud walked away with a tidy profit of $325,000.  Not bad for a days work.

Amazing what you can find with as little as five minutes worth of searching online, isn't it?  Tomorrow, we're going to try to find Ms Essonreid and get some idea what a million dollar home buyer looks like.

Another installment of the "Five minute mortgage fraud investigation" and learning to master the obvious...

It's that easy folks! Yesterday we left off with a troubling deed that we found on the Miami Dade County clerk of courts website that involved a company owned by convicted mortgage fraudster John Romney. We asked our readers to take a good look at the document and see what didn't seem kosher about it. Here's the document again...

The document is simple enough, a simple deed from the seller, Raul Romero, to the buyer, Property Collateral Inc which is owned by John Romney.

Let's start with the most obvious problem with this document, the dates. From the notary section on page two we see that a notary named Aned Perdomo notarized this deed on November 21, 2006, no problem right?

But then a closer look at the top right of the first page reveals that the deed wasn't recorded till nearly four years later!

WTF is that about? Why wouldn't the closing agent record the deed right after the closing?

Moving on, we can also deduce the sales price of the home to Property Collateral through the documentary stamps, in this case based on the clerks stamp it looks like the doc stamps were $4,530.00. In Dade county the doc stamps are calculated at the rate of 60 cents per hundred dollars of the sales price, so in this instance based on the doc stamps the sales price of the home would have been $755,000. So far so good right?


What's troubling is that after another search of the County Recorders Office we can't seem to find a mortgage for Property Collateral's purchase of this property which means that it must have been paid for in cash. Interesting, let's go back to the recorders office website and see if we find anything else regarding this property...

HUH? Check the item high lighted in yellow, it's a lis pendens for this very property! According to this it looks like Deutsche Bank began foreclosure proceedings against this property on November 9, 2009. Let's take a look at that document...

How can you file a lis pendens in 2009 when the deed wasn't recorded till 2010? This must mean that there was a mortgage somewhere between November 21, 2006 when Property Collateral aquired the property and November 4, 2009 when the foreclosure action was initiated. So where's this mortgage? It can't be in Property Collateral's name otherwise we would have seen it when we searched the County Recorders website. What now? Let's take another look at this Lis Pendens, specifically who's being sued...

Perhaps searching the recorders website using one of these other defendants names will provide a clue as to what's going on. Let's give it a shot...

Bingo, now we find another lis pendens for the same property that didn't appear in our previous search, one that was filed a little over a year before the others. Huh?! Let's take a look at the document...

JEEZE! Let's take a look at the defendants...

DAMN! They're suing everyone and their brother! At the very least we can identify Raul Romero as being the guy who sold the property to Property Collateral, but who the hell is "Leonor Essonreid"?

This is where things get really interesting, back to the County Recorders website and a quick search for Leonor Essonreid...

Viola, there you have it. Two mortgages for the same property apparently recorded after Property Collateral aka John Romney purchased the property or so it seems...

The next part gets real good, we'll discuss on Monday.

Just how hard is it to investigate and find a fraudulent real estate transaction?

There have been a number of rumors circulating over the last few months surrounding the circumstances of convicted fraudster John Romney's mortgage fraud case and the arrangements that were afforded to him in exchange for testimony against other people he worked with throughout his criminal career. I have to wonder though, why in the world would any law enforcement agency need to make a deal with someone who's involved in a paperwork intensive crime like Mortgage Fraud? After all, the evidence is all there on paper and recorded with not just the banks that financed the deals but also with the county recorders office among others. To give you an idea of just how easy it is to build one of these cases, let's give ourselves five minutes online and see what we can come up with.


Let's start with Mr. Romney, at the very least we know that he ran the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud deal through a company he owned that was called "Property Collateral", let's run that through the Florida Division of corporations website to see if that's correct...

Bingo. Now we've confirmed that Mr. Romney did indeed own a company called Property Collateral Inc. Now consider that any deed, mortgage or quit claim deed that's filed in Miami Dade County has to be filed with the County Recorders Office, so let's go to their website and search to see what Property Collateral has been up to...

We find 23 recorded documents from our search of the County Recorders office, most interesting though is the item highlighted in yellow, a deed that was recorded on 8/3/10. That deed strikes me as strange, what kind of real estate transaction would Mr. Romney be conducting when he knows he's about to go to jail, especially when every move he makes is under close scrutiny by law enforcement? Let's pull up that deed and see what we find...

Uh Oh! Does anyone see the problem in those docs? If you can't, take another look and pay specific attention to the dates. Amazing how we were able to find all this in less than five minutes without a badge or subpoena powers or even a cooperating witness. We'll discuss in detail tomorrow...

And then there was none, the last of the original defendants from the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case goes to jail...

As the title states, yesterday the last remaining defendant from the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case, John Arthur Romney, entered his plea and was sent to jail.  I don't have the specifics of the plea yet, all we know is that the state dropped the organized scheme to defraud and the identity theft charges while Mr. Romney pleaded guilty to the Grand Theft charge.  I find that especially troubling, that of the three defendants originally charged with "stealing" Mr. Barrera's identity for the commission of this fraud, none were successfully prosecuted for Identity Theft.  What does that tell you?  Draw your own conclusions.

While I feel no joy in seeing a young man in the prime of his life being sent off to jail, I have some level of satisfaction that there was finally justice done in light of the dozens of other mortgage fraud cases that we've discussed where the state couldn't do better than getting a probation sentence for the offenders.  I honestly believe that with a stiff sentence (30 months in state prison from what I understand) for Mr. Romney, the state is sending a message to potential fraudsters, screw around with white collar crime and your ass will be going to jail.  I'd like to commend the State Attorneys Office for having the determination to stick it out and finally achieve a just outcome in light of the severity of the crime that was committed and also to congratulate Assistant State Attorney Stephen LeClair who took over the case from the previous prosecutor as well as the head of the recently formed Mortgage Fraud unit in the State Attorneys office, Assistant State Attorney David Sherman, for achieving this conviction.


Good luck Mr. Romney, I hope you have time to reflect on the damage you've done to yourself, your family and the others that you senselessly dragged into this mess.  I pray that you and your family are able to get through the next 30 months with as little suffering as possible.

"Before he knew it, he was in the middle of a Ponzi!"

OH SNAP! Everything was great then next thing I knew, I found myself in the middle of a $40 million dollar Ponzi scheme! WTF!? That's how we're to believe Hialeah jeweler Luis Felipe Perez got caught up running a $40 million dollar Ponzi scheme. From the Miami New Times article last June...

Havana-born Perez ran a jewelery and pawn shop business, and promised investors returns of anywhere from 18 to 120 percent a year through monthly payment.

Investors thought they were investing in two of Perez's companies, Lucky Star Diamonds Inc. and Luis Felipe Jewelry Design Corp. (neither had employees other than Perez), and that their money was collateralized by diamonds. In fact, Perez said he kept diamonds in deposit safes, however they turned out to be fake.

There's a sucker born every minute, isn't there? Who could possibly believe that some two bit jeweler could provide a 120% return on an investment? Like many many other Ponzi schemers of the last decade, Mr. Perez's house of cards came falling down during the economic down turn when he was no longer able to recruit new investors. Read the SEC's press release and complaint against Mr. Perez here.


Today we learn that the real cause of Mr. Perez's downfall wasn't the unsustainable lavish lifestyle that he led, but in fact according to his attorney, Alvin Entin, the blame for Mr. Perez's indiscretions lay at the feet of loan sharks, one of which just happened to be the Mayor of the City of Hialeah, Julio Robaina, who's recently announced that he's got his eye on the county mayor seat. Take a look at this story by Jim Defede on Mayor Julio Robaina and his alleged dealings with Ponzi schemer Perez...

Now that's some funny shit. I find the suggestion that Mr. Perez was paying the private lenders that he worked with 36% interest simply laughable. During the real estate boom there were hoards of private lenders running around Miami that routinely lent large sums of money for anywhere from 7% up to 18% annual interest. The suggestion that Mr Perez was paying Mayor Robaina and the like an additional 18% under the table (cash no less) in addition to the 18% that's on the recorded mortgage docs is ludicrous considering how many people were willing to lend at the time for far less. Regardless, if you were to believe Mr Entin, his client Mr. Perez got caught in this vicous cycle of borrowing and paying back money from these "loan sharks" which ultimately led him to this life of crime, in his own words...

“Luis Perez is a nice young man,” Entin said. “He had a jewelry business and borrowed money from people who were loan sharks to get the business moving, couldn’t keep up with the payments to the loan sharks, started borrowing more money and before he knew it he was in the middle of a Ponzi.”

WHOOPS! First you find yourself borrowing money to keep your little business going and then next thing you know, BAM, you're stuck in the middle of a $40,000,000 Ponzi scheme! God damn it, don't you hate when that kinda shit happens! It's even worse when it happens to a "nice young man"! CRAP!

A little further in the interview, we get a some insight into the real motivation behind this amazing tale of private lenders who charge 36% interest rates...

“I can tell you that my client is still cooperating,” Entin said. “There are other subjects and targets of governmental interest out there. My client has provided some very useful information and I think the government is proceeding on it.”

Did you expect any less? Mr. Perez is staring at a ten year stretch in Federal prison and now all of a sudden we get this quasi "press release" with all kinds of documents and personal photos from an "unknown" source that paints a prominent politician in a bad light. Only time will tell if Mr. Perez's "useful information" will succeed in shaving time off his sentence. I've been caught off guard doing a lot of things Mr. Entin, running a 8 figure Ponzi scheme has never been one of them.

It's Miami though, a very, very small town indeed. For those of you following our blog, the old school criminal defense attorney, Alvin Entin, shouldn't be a stranger to you, Mr. Entin represented the central figure in the Barrera Mortgage fraud case, Mr. John Romney.

Doing the job that Detective Baluja and Prosecutor Kostrzewski never did, more fun with checks regarding the Barrerra mortgage fraud.

In case you guys haven't noticed, I've become rather obsessed with the Barrera Mortgage fraud case.  I'm not exactly sure why, if nothing else perhaps because of the tremendous amount of ineptitude exhibited by the lead detective that was investigating the case, Jorge Baluja and his master, Assistant State Attorney Bill Kostrzewski.  In their haste to throw together a case we've seen them both break laws, violate people's civil rights, fabricate evidence, etc, yet just when I think I've seen the worst of it, something else pops up and leaves me floored.

A week or so ago, I was rereading the original arrest affidavit that was signed by Detective Baluja and I believe authored by none other that ASA Kostrzewski when I came across this bit...

That part about no payments being made that I underlined in red really seemed strange to me...

No payments whatsoever have been made on the loan.

Something just didn't seem right about that part, I mean after all, the people involved in this fraud who made away with over $400,000 in ill gotten gains were far too smart to not make payments on the loan at least for a year in order to escape suspicion of being a fraudulent transaction.  So why would a sophisticated con man make such a simple mistake and almost certainly guarantee that his nefarious scheme was going to be found out even if the man whose identity they used for the fraud never claimed his identity was stolen?  Something seemed haywire here.

So where did that leave me?  Well, the first step was to go through all the case files again and see if there was any evidence of payments being made on the Barrera mortgage for the home located at 3390 Oak Avenue, no dice.  In fact everything in the files suggested that there had never been a single payment made which jives with what the state had presented.  Something still didn't seem right to me though.  My next step was to figure out a way to get access to records from Citibank aka Citimortgage which funded the loan in the Barrera mortgage fraud.  I realized that I had a Citibank Visa card so I went down to my local Citibank branch and decided to talk to someone in customer service, after befriending an employee at the bank, I asked whether or not they could answer some questions for me regarding a home mortgage that was in default.  Before we start, let's take a look at the good faith estimate for that mortgage to refresh our memories...

Bernardo Barrera Good Faith Estimate From Citi Mortgage for Oak Avenue Home

There you have it, the good faith estimate for the home located at 3390 Oak Avenue which was financed by CitiMortgage loan number 002005062091 with a mortgage payment of $2,900 without escrows and $2,979.58 with escrows for Hazard insurance, the same house that was at the center of the Barrera Mortgage fraud case.  So the lovely young customer service rep tells me she'll get back to me in a few days if she finds any information regarding the payment history of this loan, lo and behold a few days later I get these three gems via email...

Would you look at that?  Those three checks total $2,900 which just happens to be the amount of the mortgage payment for the Oak Avenue home's mortgage and all three check numbers have the handwritten loan number on them the matches the loan number for the Oak Avenue's home mortgage.  What a coincidence? 

The question that I'm left with after discovering the existence of these checks is WHY THE FUCK AM I DOING THE WORK THAT THE STATE WAS SUPPOSED TO DO?  If indeed the states goal was to find the man who "allegedly" stole Bernardo Barrera's identity for the commission of this crime, then why didn't the state obtain this critical evidence which would have lead directly to the people behind this case of grand theft, organized scheme to defraud and identity theft?!

For fucks sake Detective Dipshit, I'm some jackass with a blog on the last page of the internet and I've done a better job investigating this case than you have.  Detective Baluja and ASA Kostrzewski, are you going to make me go to the bank and get the surveillance videos and find out who purchased these checks as well or do you guys think you can handle that?!

Did anyone catch the significance of the interview with the realtor?

Did anyone understand the significance of the realtors statement in Tuesdays post?  In case you missed it, we had tracked down and spoken to the realtor who represented Maxine Andrews (the little old widow) in the sale of the home located at 3390 Oak Avenue to John Arthur Romney who later used the home as the vehicle with which to defraud Citi Mortgage for nearly $400,000.  In her discussions with Mr. Romney, he advised that he wanted to buy more homes in the area and that he was trying to buy the home across the street from Maxine's.  So what's the deal with the home across the street from Maxine's?  Could he have been referring to 3379 Oak Avenue?

Or maybe he was referring to 3375 Oak Avenue?

Both located across the street, both involved in massive mortgage fraud schemes and consequently both are currently in foreclosure.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But what about that other statement about "wanting to buy more homes in the area"?  Could he have been referring to the other homes in west Coconut Grove that were involved in millions of dollars worth of mortgage fraud?  Maybe like the ones that we discussed in the past (here, here and here)?  


So what do we got?  Was this conversation between the realtor and Mr. Romney just an instance of Mr. Romney running his mouth or a Freudian slip admitting to other mortgage frauds that he and or his associates were involved in?  While we have no proof of Mr. Romney being directly involved in these other mortgage frauds, by his own admission he certainly had knowledge of them and who was behind them, more on that later.  In the mean time, we'll be discussing another botched mortgage fraud case courtesy of ASA Bill Kostrzewski and we'll discuss the worlds worst forged check case.

The Straw Buyer interview number one...

We mentioned last week that we had sought out people involved in the Barrera mortgage fraud and asked them a few questions regarding the home located at 3390 Oak Avenue which was used by John Arthur Romney to defraud Citi Mortgage out of nearly $400,000.  The first person that we decided to track down was the realtor who sold Mr. Romney the home for $185,000 which he later flipped to Mr. Barrera or someone posing as Mr. Barrera for $600,000.  After digging through the records we found that the realtor was one Betty Wilburn.

Betty tells us that her client was Maxine Andrews, the little old lady that sold the home to John Romney, Maxine's husband had died and she remained at the house on Oak Avenue after his death.  The property was listed through Mrs Wilburn and was appraised at approximately $300,000; however Maxine was fed up and tired of being in that area.  Maxine was anxious to leave the area which she subsequently did and moved up north.  Fair enough.  She went on to say that a man named John Romney whose name she recalled because of the similarity to then presidential candidate Mitt Romney came by to visit Maxine regarding her home.  Maxine subsequently contacted Betty and stated that a man named John had knocked on her door and said that he would buy the house for cash.  John (Romney) offered Maxine $185,000 for her home, Betty tried to convince Maxine not to accept the offer since the home was appraised for more but Maxine insisted that she wanted to sell the house and get out of town and that after being on the market for nearly a year, this was the only offer they had ever received on the home.  Otherwise Maxine said that she would abandon the house and let it go into foreclosure.


So far so good right?  Nothing earth shattering here, widow wants to sell her house in a bad area and get out of dodge, there's a buyer standing at the door with $185,000 in cash and the realtor wants the seller to hold out for more money.  Here's were it gets good, Mrs. Wilburn recalls having a conversation with John Romney during which time he advised that he wanted to buy more homes in the area and that he was trying to buy the home across the street from Maxine's. 

Did anyone catch that?  We'll discuss tomorrow...

Other homes in the area...

Before we get to the interviews we mentioned yesterday, I think we need to revisit some of the homes that we discussed last summer that surround the Oak Avenue home that was at the heart of the Barrera mortgage fraud case.  The first two are particularly important since they are directly across the street from the home used in the Barrera mortgage fraud.

How can we forget 3379 Oak Ave?  Last sale December 2008, sales price $397,000 or $616.00 PER SQUARE FOOT!


Or just next door, 3375 Oak Ave, last sale date September 2008, sales price $490,000 or $425.00 PER SQUARE FOOT!


Around the corner...

3551 Frow Ave, last sale May 2008, sales price $500,000 or $438.00 PER SQUARE FOOT!


and just a few doors away...

3309 William Ave, last sale June 2008, sales price $450,000 or $511.00 PER SQUARE FOOT!


One more...
3146 Hibiscus St, last sale June 2008, sale price $490,000 or $471.00 PER SQUARE FOOT!



We discussed these transactions in detail last summer (here, here and here), we've learned recently they may have much more in common.  Notice all these homes that we mentioned were within one square mile of each were all purchased within months of each other.  Coincidence or brilliantly engineered scam to loot this poor area of Coconut Grove?  We'll discuss on Monday...

Yet another plea date come and gone for Mr. John Romney...

Did anyone expect any different?  Mr. Romney, the man who made over $400,000 as a result of the Barrera mortgage fraud was set to plead out to his role in the fraud yesterday August 31, 2010 but guess what?  As before Mr. Romney's plea got postponed again, but this time it wasn't for 30 days but instead it was delayed till December 21, 2010!  From the court docket...

We've been watching this plea date get postponed ever since the first one was set back in November 2009, once again from the docket...

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going on, Mr. Romney is obviously sweetening his plea by ratting on people he's done his nefarious deeds with in the past.  Did you expect any less?  While Mr. Romney is busy doing whatever he's doing in order to reduce his sentence, the clock is still ticking, people are talking and more facts are coming to light, facts that I'm sure Mr. Romney doesn't want anyone to find out about.  While reviewing the docket and the endless postponement of Mr. Romney's plea dates I'm reminded of the finite nature of life and believe me Mr. Romney, it's a lot later than you think...