Some of you may remember the $16mm federal mortgage fraud indictment from last July that we discussed at length on our blog which involved several Plantation police officers and an FBI agent getting charged. I was curious about what was going on with case so I went back to our blog posts regarding the case and started to read some of the comments that our readers had left. I found this one especially interesting:
Anonymous said...
Very simple case. The cops and others bought homes fixed them up and sold them. The cops submitted real info, the brokers forged documents on these loans and hundreds of others. The Governent was made aware of the fraud commited against the cops and many others they ignored the eviedence and targeted the cops. End of story, look at the other loans you will find the same thing. People who commit mortgage fraud don't fix up the homes and make mortgage payments for several years, and then sell the homes at losses. They run away with money! Someone please do a real investigation, maybe a reporter, as the FDLE has clearly not.
Now that's interesting allegation. The cops submitted real information for the loans and the brokers were the ones that falsified all the information on the applications? Some how I didn't pick up on that till this morning, what if that really was the case? What if the cops were actually submitting accurate information to the mortgage brokers who then turned around and adulterated the applications without the applicants knowledge? What I still can't comprehend is that according to this comment, the loans were paid for several years then the properties were sold, if that's true then there wasn't a default either, so where's the crime? Considering how rampant mortgage fraud was during the real estate boom, aren't there better cases to prosecute than this one? If the cops that were charged never submitted false information to the banks and it was the mortgage brokers who did, what exactly were the cops guilty of then?
This comment and this case warrants a closer look, I'll see if I can find some more information on the case and post tomorrow.
Due to the tropical storm last Friday that never came , we here in South Florida had an unexpected long weekend. The Straw Buyer and family attended a couple of barbecues and kicked back, wifey had a bit too much to drink though...
Steve Stoll, a politically connected Republican attorney in Fort Lauderdale arrested last month in a mortgage fraud case, is now under investigation by the Florida Bar. Florida Bar spokeswoman Karen Kirksey declined to provide specifics except to confirm that Stoll and fellow lawyer Stephen Orchard, also indicted in the fraud case, are under investigation. In June, a federal indictment detailed how a group of attorneys, police officers and mortgage brokers falsified documents to obtain $16.5 million in loans they used to buy and flip properties. Stoll's attorney, Robert Nicholson, who has said his client is innocent, was unaware the Bar was investigating but wasn't surprised. ``The Bar as a matter of course opens an investigation anytime a licensed attorney is charged with a criminal offense.'' Stoll and his wife, Rebecca Stoll, a former North Broward Hospital District commissioner, are familiar names in Broward political circles. They have supported candidates in recent years, including Gov. Charlie Crist in 2006 and in 2009 and Bill McCollum in 2009, and raise money for the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Discovery and Science. -- AMY SHERMAN
Uh oh, that certainly doesn't sound good for the lawyers involved now does it? Throughout the course of our blog we've noticed that the Bar has moved at glacial speeds against the attorneys that have been charged with crimes, yet in this case they seemed to be moving quickly against these two.What struck me as strange about this article was the following quote from Mr. Stoll's attorney...
`The Bar as a matter of course opens an investigation anytime a licensed attorney is charged with a criminal offense.''
Is that right? If indeed that is the case, what happened with the attorney from the Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud Task Forces inaugural case, Attorney David Rodriguez? You all remember him don't you? This was the attorney that was charged with setting up an illegal home purchase where the buyer was getting tens of thousands of dollars from the closing without the lenders knowledge as well as paying off the sellers mortgage weeks before the closing actually occurred according to the state. He was also accused putting the deal together with an undercover cop acting as the sellers accountant. With those kinds of allegations, surely Mr. Rodriguez had some sort of investigation initiated by the Bar regarding his alleged involvement in this fraud, but as we mentioned before, there's no record of any discipline arising from this incident...
We're gonna take a closer look and see what we can find...
What's up with that? Why is everyone investigating these mortgage fraud cases so quick to conclude there was fraud without properly investigating? We've been told by several of our readers that the banks own investigators are so overwhelmed with mortgage fraud cases that they don't have time to properly investigate the cases the way they should be. We've seen first hand that the cops running mortgage fraud cases can't even grasp the fundamentals of the real estate and mortgage business, yet they're the first ones to slam together a case and start cuffing people. Why? What's the rush to classify these cases as "fraud"?
Let's look at it from the banks point of view, why would they rush to claim there was fraud? One hypothesis that we presented earlier in our blog was that the banks had some way of getting reimbursed if they classified these mortgages that had gone bad as fraud. That certainly sounds plausible doesn't it? Isn't that type of business that brought AIG and Lehman Brothers down?
Why are the cops so eager to conclude there was fraud and slam together a case? Our guess at least with the Bernardo Barrera case was that the Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud task force needed a case to mark the one year anniversary of their first arrests. Was it a coincidence that the arrests in the Barrera case were made on October 3, 2008 and the task forces inaugural arrests were made on October 3, 2007? Prosecutor Kostrzewski later confessed that "he was under a lot of pressure" to put the case together, why? Look at that October 3 date from the perspective of the money hungry Chairman of the mortgage fraud task force that was desperate for federal funding, is it just a coincidence that the arrests were made two days after the beginning of the fiscal year? Check out Prosecutor Kostrzewski's handy work with the plea agreement for Michael Martinez...
"As a special condition of Community Control and probation, defendant shall make payments of not less than five hundred dollars ($500.00) per month to victim Citi Mortgage, Inc., or to its successor(s), or, in the event that Citi Mortgage, Inc., is reimbursed for its loss by title insurance, to its insurer of title."
Boy, it sure is nice to know that the prosecutor is so concerned about Citi Mortgage or its insurer to get their money back. In fact this very plea agreement is going to come back and bite the prosecutor in the ass, the testimony that Mr. Martinez gave the prosecutor was pure bullshit. The fact of the matter is the prosecutor wanted so desperately to have some sort of testimony against the attorney that he charged, that he bought whatever came out of the guys mouth hook line and sinker. I can't discuss details right now, but let's just say that there is irrefutable evidence to completely disprove nearly everything the witness said regarding his interaction with the attorney, but the prosecutor wasn't going to hear it. Not only did he believe everything the guy said, but as evidenced by the plea agreement, he gave him a sweetheart deal and sent him on his way without ever investigating any of his claims. Nice work Bill!
How the hell can everything get so ass backwards? We proved beyond a reasonable doubt (at least in our opinion) that the man who claimed his identity was stolen, Bernardo Barrera, was completely full of shit, yet he got away scott free. While the mortgage brokers and their associates got arrested in the Plantation cops case, the mortgage brokers in the Barrera case got away without even being questioned! What about the appraiser that appraised the Oak Avenue home that was at the center the Barrera fraud for three times more than it was appraised for just one month earlier? Why wasn't he never questioned? WTF?!
This brings me back to the Plantation cops case. Somehow I can't reconcile that mess, wtf happened there? What kind of trouble were the mortgage brokers in that led them to cut deals and help build the case against the cops? Were any of the homes that were at the center of that case even in foreclosure? As far was we can tell from the indictment, the homes were rented, mortgages being paid and everything seemed on the up an up?! What gives? We're going to have take a closer look at that case.
While we're here trying to decipher this nonsense, look what the Talibans been up to, TRAINING MONKEYS TO BE TERRORISTS!
YIKES! Maybe the Miami Dade County police department might want to think about training monkeys to investigate mortgage fraud, they couldn't do any worse than Detective Baluja!
After diligently searching we've come up with a copy of the indictment the government filed against the police officers and the FBI agent that we talked about last week. Take a look...
If indeed the allegations in the indictment are true then, there seems to be a lot more going on than simply misstating facts on a loan application. We'll discuss tomorrow...
Attorney Michael Walsh, representing the accused ringleader, former Plantation officer Joseph Guaracino, said his client was an active investor who brought in the others to buy dozens of properties during the real estate boom. They submitted truthful information to qualify for the loans, he said.
``What Joe and the other cops did was legitimate,'' Walsh said after a Fort Lauderdale bond hearing for most of the 13 defendants charged in the indictment that was unsealed Wednesday. ``We know what we submitted, and the records were clean. We can't say what the mortgage brokers did, exactly -- except they committed the fraud.''
Interesting, defense attorney Walsh is putting the blame squarely at the feet of the mortgage brokers.
Walsh and other defense lawyers said the U.S. attorney's office is building the controversial case on the words of mortgage brokers Matthew Gulla of Davie and Rene Rodriguez Jr. of Plantation, who are cooperating with prosecutors.
Of course they're cutting deals! There's no glory in arresting mortgage brokers now is there?! Mortgage brokers don't make headlines, but arresting cops and an FBI agent certainly does! Speaking of the FBI agent, Robert Depriest...
DePriest, coordinator of an FBI hazardous-materials team, normally would be placed on administrative leave without pay after being indicted. But in this instance he will be able to keep his job with pay while the case is pending because FBI supervisors believe he broke no laws, sources said.
Huh?! His own supervisors at the FBI believe he hasn't broken any laws. Very good. One of the crimes that FBI agent Depriest is accused of committing is supplying "false and fraudulent statements" loan application, specifically:
He said that it would be owner-occupied and his primary residence -- untrue statements, according to the indictment.
HOLY $HIT! If the feds are arresting people for lying about facts like that on loan applications then 99% of the citizens of South Florida better start looking for an attorney and a bondsman!
The allegations the feds make against the law enforcement officers are remarkable, some of which seem a little flimsy at least in our opinion, that is from what we've been able to glean from the articles we've been able to find. With that said though, using this case a template, we're left with a couple of questions when we compare it to the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case,
If feds arrested the cops for making false statements on loan applications, why wasn't anyone arrested for creating and supplying the false information on the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case?
If indeed it was the mortgage brokers that falsified the documents according to this federal indictment, why weren't the mortgage brokers indicted or even questioned in the Barrera mortgage fraud?
Moving right along, we had a chance encounter with an attorney yesterday who specializes in real estate law, among other things we discussed the federal case against the Plantation police officers. During the course of our conversation he told us about an attorney who made a living partly by finding clients who thought they were somehow wronged in a real estate transaction then suing the attorneys and title companies that conducted the transactions. He went on to say that this attorney who had a highly condescending holier than though attitude wouldn't even litigate the cases but would threaten to refer them to a litigator that she called a "Puerto Rican street fighting bad ass" (his words not ours) when they wouldn't settle. We asked who this attorney was, lo and behold it was none other than MARIA TERESA LOPEZ! DAMN! You all remember her don't you? Turns out that Ms. Lopez was slinging her $hit and threatening this attorney right up until she was disbarred! That takes some balls doesn't it!?Regardless, for those of you following "Ms. Holier than though" and her case, it looks like she's set to plead out on September 1.Karma's a bitch ain't it Ms. Lopez?
I read a story in the Miami Herald on October 7, 2008 regarding a mortgage fraud case that didn't make any sense to me, I did a little digging and what I found left me stunned. A tale of a task force head whose political ambitions have run amuck, a detective without a modicum of common sense, a reporter that prints anything that's put in front of him, the railroading of an attorney by this machine to further the ambitions of its head and the lengths that those involved will go to in order to salvage a case that should have never been. Please take the time to start from the oldest post first and enjoy...
