Chain of Title (12 page)

But the bread crumbs Nye Lavalle laid down a decade earlier helped Michael navigate the foreclosure maze, which he felt compelled to keep traversing, like a video gamer spending days on end trying to reach the boss level. Michael's old habits—happy hours, nights watching the ballgame—faded to background. At work his mind drifted to foreclosures; at night he scoured the Web for information, fueled by Miller Lite and a desire to answer one simple question: who owned his loan?

Before the thirty-day deadline, Michael and Jennifer decided to dispute the debt, based on the erroneous claim of JPMorgan Chase as the creditor. The initial reaction from Chase was silence. Perhaps because of the Washington Mutual collapse and the subsequent turmoil, Michael didn't hear anything for nearly a year. With so many foreclosures streaming in, servicers and law firms lost many in the shuffle. Michael used the respite to become an expert in foreclosure fraud.

The turning point came when Michael discovered that all official public records in Florida were available online. He went to the St. Lucie County clerk's website and found the mortgage assignment for his home: MERS, as nominee for the loan originator, AmNet, transferred it to Washington Mutual, which was in the process of becoming JPMorgan Chase. The signers of the documents were Barbara Hindman, vice president of MERS as nominee for AmNet, and Shelley Thievin, also a vice president.

Michael Googled both of their names. LinkedIn profiles labeled Barbara Hindman and Shelley Thievin as employees of JPMorgan Chase. In the midst of the Washington Mutual crackup, Chase was apparently assigning mortgages to themselves, despite holding no interest in the loan and never
putting up any money toward the transaction. It was easy to discern that Chase executed these assignments after the fact: AmNet Mortgage went out of business and was acquired by Wachovia in late 2005, shortly after Michael and Jennifer closed.
This assignment was dated April 20, 2009, more than three years after that merger. Amid this wholesale theft of who knows how many mortgages, the surname “Thievin” struck Michael as darkly ironic.

The mortgage assignment listed the Washington Mutual address as Jacksonville, so Michael pulled up Duval County's public records, searching for Barbara and Shelley's mortgages to verify their signatures. It checked out. Michael even found Barbara Hindman's direct office line and called her up. He never got her on the phone, but on voicemail she called herself a “document executor.”

Michael's mind was racing. Why should he give a couple thousand dollars a month to Chase? Because they said so? Who truly owned the loan? How many people were losing their homes from scams like this? And most of all, why would banks like JPMorgan Chase keep doing this despite a public-record paper trail for anyone with a laptop to locate? Did they think nobody would notice?

The next question became whether Chase assigned mortgages to themselves on a widespread basis. Over the next several months, Michael searched public records in every county in Florida. New York and Ohio also had excellent public records portals online, along with some counties in Illinois. And Michael kept finding Chase documents with Barbara Hindman and Shelley Thievin, usually with the same notaries and witnesses, all out of the same office in Jacksonville, which must have been some kind of document factory. Even when the lenders assigning the mortgage were out of state, the assignments had the Jacksonville address. The more clever assignments were backdated to make it look like they were executed at the proper time. But the names of the signers gave things away, along with the notary stamps: Michael found documents with impossible dates, because the notaries hadn't yet become notaries at that time.

Michael began to notice patterns among the documents. He saw the same combinations of names doing the signing, the same telltale mistakes in the documentation. And it didn't stop with JPMorgan Chase: Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, all the big banks had the same evidence
problems, including employees signing for different banks, suspicious-looking signatures, the works.

When Michael talked to his wife about his discoveries, she thought the pressure had cracked him up. But despite no prior experience, he was driven to dig through the public records almost every night, accumulating this dossier of a great wrong perpetrated on the public. The same banks that precipitated the crash and got paid off in the bailout were getting even richer off the leftovers. He saw it as the biggest transfer of wealth the world had ever seen.

After a couple of months Michael found
Living Lies
and started commenting under an alias. Michael built a separate life for his foreclosure fraud persona, walling it off from his everyday existence. He created a special email address for foreclosure fraud work. He established a phone number through Google Voice (the number ended in 5437, or LIES). And he set up boundaries, working on the issue during the week but keeping weekends free for the family. He thought he could compartmentalize, dividing the husband and father from the foreclosure fighter.

In June 2009 a process server finally delivered foreclosure papers to Michael and Jennifer. JPMorgan Chase was listed as the plaintiff, with Florida Default Law Group, the same foreclosure mill as in Lisa's case, representing them. Michael had met with foreclosure defense attorneys, but he felt he knew more about what was happening than they did. So even before they got served, Michael planned to have his wife act as a
pro se
litigant (only she could do it, because Michael wasn't on the mortgage). He assembled hundreds of documents from counties across Florida, with the same signers as in his case, to present to the court. He couldn't wait to see the faces of the bank lawyers. Jennifer filed a motion to dismiss, kicking off a protracted battle for their home.

Around this time, Michael set up Google Reader, a website aggregator, to track every news article related to housing, mortgages, and foreclosures. He would crawl through the headlines every day, looking for whatever stood out. He used Facebook, Digg, FriendFeed, and a Twitter feed,
@4closurefraud
, to spread what he found. Tweeting media stories and blog posts, Michael gained a thousand or so followers who thirsted for foreclosure news.

Michael would dive into comment sections of the stories Google Reader helped him find, pointing out document fraud and encouraging people to
discover the truth. It was his few minutes a day to spread the message, a tentative foray into activism. But comment sections of mainstream media sites, notorious as the seedy back alleys of the Internet, weren't receptive to idealism of any kind. It was like holding an atheism rally inside a church. “Deadbeat” was the favored term of response. Or “pay your mortgage.”

The commenting project connected Michael to Susan Martin, the
St. Petersburg Times
journalist who wrote about Nationwide Title document signers Brian Bly and Crystal Moore. Michael wrote in the comments:
“I have researched this in my county records and this is being done to hundreds of documents per month. In most of the cases I have seen, the ‘vice president' assignors of mortgage are actually employees of the lender it is being assigned to.” Susan Martin asked Michael for evidence. He sent back a stack of assignments from Hillsborough County (in the Tampa/St. Pete area, Martin's home base). “Hope this is enough to get you started,” Michael said.

Susan appreciated the research but asked Michael, “How would this story be different from the one I already did on employees of Nationwide Title Insurance signing as vice presidents of various companies?” Michael responded that Nationwide Title was just a cleanup gang; JPMorgan Chase was doing it in-house with their own employees. “They are literally stealing homes that they have no right to for personal gain,” he wrote. Susan saw his point but had other stories to handle. She told Michael to keep in touch.

Michael liked Lisa almost immediately. They had plenty in common, aside from both being sued by Florida Default Law Group. They were both ordinary people new to this crisis, with no doubts about who was to blame. And they were both so driven to expose the injustice that they could come off a little . . . obsessed. Maybe even crazy.

So when Lisa asked Michael to write a guide for searching public records, he considered it a good idea. He'd been creating formal presentations since his days at Motorola, and he'd been searching foreclosure documents for a year. It only took a weekend to compile. He gave it the spartan title
“Looking Up Public Records,” with a clip art cover that became his calling card: a magnifying glass focused on a house, with the dictionary definition of the word “fraud” swimming underneath. The guide begins:

Presented here is a guide to looking up public records online for possible forgeries, fabrications and fraud when facing foreclosure. . . .

During the housing boom, lenders passed around mortgages as if they were whiskey bottles at a frat party. Notes were lost, destroyed, sold into multiple pools. Mortgages were not recorded and exorbitant fees were collected by the big firms on Wall Street.

Now that the bubble has burst, “lenders” are trying to collect on loans they do not own, in most cases never lent a dime on the transaction. . . . They are steamrolling the courts because hardly anyone is contesting their foreclosures.

So I started digging around in the bowels of the Internets [
sic
] to see where this rabbit hole led.

Using Florida as an example, the guide described precisely, complete with screenshots, how to search official records online. Michael displayed a mortgage assignment and annotated it with questions. Next to one signature, Michael wrote, “MERS as nominee for First National Bank of Arizona, Barbara Hindman, assigning mortgage over to JPMorgan Chase while employed by JPMorgan Chase?” He pasted in Hindman's and her partner Shelley Thievin's work histories from LinkedIn to prove they actually worked for Chase. To spot Hindman and Thievin in multiple documents, the guide explained, you simply reverse-engineer the record searches, using the keyword of the foreclosing entity. It wasn't just Barbara Hindman and Shelley Thievin; the guide included assignments with Beth Cottrell, Whitney Cook, and Christina Trowbridge, all of whom appeared on Lisa's mortgage documents.

One document, which Michael dubbed the “Triple Play,” had Bill Koch, signing for MERS as nominee for Pinnacle Financial Corporation, assigning the mortgage over to . . .
Bill Koch
, of Select Portfolio Servicing. Michael imagined a conversation in court, where the homeowner's lawyer questioned this activity:

       
DEFENDANT
:
But your honor, he works for the company he is assigning the mortgage to. Isn't that a conflict of interest, fraud?

       
PLAINTIFF
:
He may be employed by the company that the mortgage is being assigned to, but at the time of the assignment he was acting as a representative of MERS
.

Other examples “appear to be blatant forgeries where they don't even take the time to match signatures,” Michael wrote, illustrating this by comparing signatures of the same officials on multiple documents. Placing them side by side revealed wide varieties between signatures, allegedly from the same person. Michael explained how to check dates on the assignments, to see if they were filed after the notice of legal proceeding, a proof of fabrication. He instructed how to look up the notaries and check their business address against the address of the foreclosing agent. “I have found notaries that work in the next building over from the pretender lender foreclosing agent,” suggesting an unsavory relationship of notaries signing masses of documents without scrutiny.

The guide included dozens of suspect signatures, misdated documents, and shady transfers. “There are thousands of them!” Michael exhorted, with “thousands” crossed out and “possibly millions” substituted. Summing up, Michael urged readers to perform their own searches and report back what they find. “Follow the Guide, research these matters deeper, and collaborate with others. . . . Let's use the Internet in what it was intended for, exchanging raw data between researchers. All the information is there. It just needs to be pieced together.”

On October 11 Michael posted the guide on Scribd, where you can upload large documents. Lisa immediately posted it on the front page of
Foreclosure Hamlet
. Michael promoted the guide everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments at
Living Lies
.
“Any feedback is welcomed, good and bad. . . . If anyone needs help finding information on your ‘vice president' or ‘assistant secretary' just let me know.”

Two days after Michael posted it, Karl Denninger, a popular (and rather bombastic) libertarian finance blogger who ran
Market-ticker.org
, published the guide on his site under the heading “A Birdie on Possible Foreclosure Frauds.” Denninger introduced it by saying,
“This is so blatant and outrageous that if the federal government's law enforcement agencies (e.g. the FBI, et al) do not immediately bring federal charges they must be deemed intentionally complicit. Ditto for the state Attorneys General.”

The page views started rising: two thousand, four thousand, six thousand, twelve thousand. Michael checked it every half hour at work, and while he didn't tell colleagues or his wife about it, he could hardly contain his excitement.

Michael started getting emails and phone calls (his Google Voice number was on the guide) from across the country, alternately thanking him and asking for help with their foreclosure cases. Many emails were addressed “Dear Sir or Madam”: on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. A Texas oil and gas landman emailed, claiming to have assembled 200,000 acres in leases along the Fayetteville shale. “Someone without this background who did this qualifies for some type of award,” he wrote, suggesting Michael start a business helping people file fraud suits against lenders to recover damages. This led to a series of phone calls, with the oilman wanting to enlist Michael in running title on energy leases across Texas. Michael was fascinated but had no idea what to say. It wasn't long ago that he asked Nye Lavalle for help and was politely rushed off the phone. Now he was on the other end of the line.