Chain of Title (17 page)

Johnson-Seck lived in Texas but traveled to Palm Beach for the meeting, on July 9, 2009.
She stated that she had authority to sign for MERS, despite not being employed by them. In fact, Johnson-Seck could sign for MERS, OneWest, IndyMac, the FDIC as conservator for IndyMac, Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York, and U.S. Bank. “And that's all I can think of off the top of my head,” she added. Tom Ice asked Johnson-Seck how many foreclosure-related documents she signed every week. She estimated 750.

“How long do you spend executing each document?” Tom asked.

“I have changed my signature considerably,” Johnson-Seck said proudly. “It's just an
E
now. So not more than thirty seconds.”

These were sworn affidavits, where Johnson-Seck attested to reviewing business processes at the servicer and all relevant information on the document, material facts that would lead to someone losing their home. She gave each case thirty seconds.

“Is it true that you don't read each document before you sign it?” Tom Ice continued.

“That's true,” Johnson-Seck replied. She didn't know who inputted the figures on the documents, or how the records were generated. She relied on an on-site specialist from Lender Processing Services to run a quality control check on a 10 percent sample. And she admitted to not signing in the presence of a notary, undermining the purpose of notarization.

Johnson-Seck's casual admissions shocked Tom. But Johnson-Seck was just a foot soldier, assured by her superior that blindly signing documents was part of her job. Tom didn't blame her, just thanked her for giving up the scheme. More important, Johnson-Seck revealed the underlying crime in the Israel Machado case: the plaintiff, IndyMac, never held the promissory note or the mortgage and was trying to foreclose without standing on behalf of a trustee. IndyMac fraudulently tried to assign the mortgage to themselves after the foreclosure case was filed, to cover up the standing
problem. Tom immediately filed a motion to dismiss the case. Florida Default Law Group, IndyMac's lawyer, countered by striking Johnson-Seck's affidavits, attempting to bury the evidence of fraud.
But the judge sided with Ice Legal in the case, throwing out the foreclosure and ordering that FDLG pay Ice's $30,000 legal bill. Despite this success, in many cases judges pushed the paper through, willfully blinding themselves to the misconduct. Those foreclosures trudged along, and Tom and Ariane prepared appeals while working their other cases.

One day in early November 2009, Tom ran across a letter to the Florida Supreme Court from Lisa Epstein. Like many lawyers, he had been following the task force on foreclosure processes—one of the task force members, in fact, was April Charney. Lisa's letter knocked Tom's socks off. She presented herself as a nurse and a working mom, but Tom figured she had to have some legal training; she could really write. He and Ariane thought Lisa might be able to help them with filing appeals. They contacted Lisa and asked if she could come in. Lisa was shopping at a produce stand when she got the call, and she quickly agreed to meet. She brought Michael along.

Tom and Ariane were not only shocked that Lisa and Michael weren't lawyers but also that they held full-time jobs despite all the work they were doing and all the knowledge they had acquired. “When do you get your work done?” Ariane asked them, and Lisa and Michael just shrugged. Sleep being optional helped.

Tom showed them a couple of early depositions, including the one featuring Erica Johnson-Seck. Michael and Lisa knew this behavior was going on but never saw an employee cop to it in testimony. It made the fraud too real. “You should let me put this on my site; people have to see this,” Michael said. Tom had toyed with publishing the depositions, but Ice Legal's site didn't have any readers. They already revealed the contents of the deposition in a public motion, so Tom didn't see how it would violate any privileges.

Tom talked about some other cases, too, including one involving Florida Default Law Group over some suspicious-looking affidavits for reasonable attorney's fees. The signer's name was Lisa Cullaro, and the notary was Erin Cullaro. At least that was the case on this particular affidavit; sometimes Lisa Cullaro would be the notary. Erin's notarizations had a variety
of different signatures, from her full name to just an
E
and everything in between. Ariane put all the signatures on one long piece of paper to make the comparisons easier; even the short versions didn't seem to come from the same person, and
Lisa Cullaro's signatures looked off as well. Ice Legal recently requested a deposition with the Cullaros.

“They're on my documents, too! Do you know Erin works for the attorney general's office?” Lisa said.

“What?” Ariane replied.

Lisa showed them the links. Even Erin's previous employment with Florida Default Law Group was suspect: these were supposed to be independent assessments of attorney's fees, not assessments from ex-employees. But working for the attorney general's office took it to a whole other level, completely changing the Ices' thinking on the deposition. Tom wanted to know if Erin was working on anything at the Economic Crimes division involving foreclosures. Ariane wondered if Cullaro revealed to her employers that she was moonlighting as a notary. A public records request could uncover those documents if they existed. Also, they wanted her official travel records. If she went out of state on any of the occasions when she purportedly notarized documents for Florida Default Law Group, that would be serious evidence of forgery.

Michael focused more on how much the Cullaros were paid per affidavit. “Two, three bucks a signature, thousands a week? Plus an assistant AG gig? That's a lot of cash flow.”

A few days after the meeting Tom Ice sent the transcript of Johnson-Seck's deposition over to Michael, and on November 15 Michael posted it at
4closureFraud
with the headline “Full Deposition of the Infamous Erica Johnson-Seck.” He added Ice Legal's pleading for sanctions in the case, for filing documents
“in complete disregard of the truth.”

Across the state, Matt Weidner read the deposition and had the same incredulous reaction. Prior to that point, Matt's blog mostly contained short commentaries and outbursts with titles like “Mortgage Modification, Santa Claus and Other Fairy Tales” and “The Stock Market Is a Ponzi Scheme.” He'd posted a couple of court decisions before, but never a deposition. Matt had access to transcripts like this, through contacts around the state and April Charney's listserv. Instead of just ranting, he could use the blog to make them available. Matt believed in full transparency, that anything
occurring in a courtroom should be public. And if the disclosure put pressure on the outlaw banks, all the better.
Matt republished the Erica Johnson-Seck deposition on his site. And in January he wrote one of his patented tirades, based on a conversation with Tom Ice about the deposition. “Jesus, they're like robots,” Matt told Tom, referring to the signers. In the blog post, Matt put it all together:

In the vast majority of cases where these documents are produced, the person signing the documents does not have the legal basis to swear to the facts placed on the paper they are signing. We know from depositions taken of these “robo signers” that they don't even read the documents placed in front of them and the notaries and witnesses that are supposed to watch them sign are not present.

Some lawyers didn't like
the term “robo-signing”—it softened the crime, made it sound like an automated labor-saving device instead of an improper process—but it caught on.

Meanwhile, Florida Default Law Group played the same games with the Cullaro case that they did with the Erica Johnson-Seck matter.
First FDLG denied requests for communications between the Cullaros and the law firm, terming them “privileged and confidential.” Then they filed an objection to making the Cullaros available for questioning, which they called a “fishing expedition.” Ariane sent an email to her counterpart at FDLG, asking if they were operating as the Cullaros' lawyer; they replied that they were. But the Cullaros were supposed to be independent experts. When Tom pointed out how inappropriate that was, FDLG replied that “upon further investigation, our firm does not represent the Cullaros,” and then they withdrew all Cullaro affidavits, arguing that depositions would now be unnecessary.

The Ices subpoenaed Lisa and Erin Cullaro as fact witnesses to misconduct involving FDLG. The Cullaros hired their own attorney—John Cullaro of the Cullaro Law Firm, their brother. Ice Legal scheduled hearings to force Erin and Lisa to testify, while issuing public records requests for any communications with the attorney general's office around Erin's FDLG employment. The fish was trying to wriggle off the hook, but Tom and Ariane were patiently reeling it in. And of course, they kept Michael and Lisa, their newest colleagues, apprised of the developments.

Over in North Carolina, Max Gardner stood outside a courtroom, in heated conversation with the vice president for a big mortgage company. “Do you understand what's going to happen?” the vice president thundered. “You're going to destroy the country. And if you don't stop, we'll just go to Congress and get the laws changed!”

Max thought about it. “You know, we have some changes we'd like to make, too!”

10

THE SPECIALIST

December 2009

As the economy sputtered back to life, winter brought a few more snowbirds back to Palm Beach than the previous year, but nothing like before the recession. Still, on her trips around the city, Lisa Epstein had to dodge the sudden lane changes of elderly drivers desperate for a good lunch table at the nearest deli. Away from the busiest avenues, Lisa would usually find herself back on the alphabet streets in Lake Worth, among the abandoned homes. A couple of years earlier, families trimmed the Christmas tree in those living rooms. Kids opened presents and hugged their loved ones. Now they were who knows where, the memories left out in the yard with the rotting furniture.

Throughout that winter, the Great Foreclosure Machine careened forward, flailing away like a boxer in the dark. In December, a Las Vegas woman named
Nilly Mauck returned home to find every room in her condo emptied and her belongings thrown away. Her condo was 1156, and 1157 was in foreclosure: subcontractors hired to “trash out” the repossessed property got the numbers mixed up. A few days later, the television station that reported the incident heard from
another man who claimed the same thing. Nilly contacted the trash-out team, and they only offered
$5,000 as compensation for everything she owned.

The Horoskis of East Patchogue, New York, won a case against IndyMac, with the judge canceling their mortgage entirely. Two weeks later, IndyMac sent the couple a letter demanding $474,936.78 anyway. In Sarasota, Wells Fargo filed suit on a condo owner; they named the junior lien holders in
the lawsuit, which led to the spectacle of
Wells Fargo (the holder of the first mortgage) suing Wells Fargo (the holder of the second). The defendant Wells Fargo hired a law firm to represent itself in a lawsuit against itself.

Before Christmas, Citigroup made a big announcement that it was “suspending” foreclosure activity nationwide for thirty days. Everyone got excited until Matt Weidner explained on his blog that
this affected only four thousand loans that Citi owned in their portfolio and didn't securitize. It was no wonder a company in England
created a hit version of the Whack-a-Mole game, with bank executives dodging the mallets instead of moles.

Lisa spent the holidays trying to secure funding to fight foreclosures full-time. Added to her letters to public officials were letters to charitable foundations, describing plans for a nonprofit organization.
“I am working until the wee hours long past midnight, after my child goes to sleep each night,” Lisa wrote. “I then awaken early to start my workday, exhausted but determined to make a positive impact and help whomever I can. There are other hard working, tireless activists whose full-time, salaried efforts would make a similar impact in the great mountain of work facing us.”

Ariane Ice became one of those sleepless activists; her job required scouring the public records. She would call Lisa late at night to talk about a filing she just discovered, or ask for help with a particular document. They would cackle on the phone at two in the morning, overtired and slap-happy, picking through the remnants of a criminal enterprise.

On the last day of 2009, Lisa wrote in her online diary, with her daughter, Jenna, at her side,
“More and more each day I stare blankly into space, eyes brimming with tears, unable to comprehend how and why this is allowed to continue.” Michael posted a different sentiment:
“Happy New Year Banksters!” He included a link to a macabre song by Gene Burnett about financial executives in their C-suites on the fiftieth floor, called “Jump You Fuckers.” Whether emotional or defiant, both Lisa and Michael held a cockeyed hope that 2010 would finally expose Wall Street's massive secret.

A couple weeks after New Year's, Michael was checking his feeds when he found an interesting essay called
“An Officer of Too Many Banks.” It cited case law where judges threw out foreclosures because the signing officer represented multiple banks in the same complaint. “In thousands of foreclosure cases, key documents may have been fabricated by employees of mortgage servicing companies who have falsely held themselves out as
bank officers. . . . [I]n 2010, the issue of the validity of Assignment is likely to finally come under examination by regulators, courts, lawyers and distressed homeowners.” It was familiar stuff to Michael, but he put the story up at his site.

The author of the piece was Lynn E. Szymoniak, Esq.

She was born in Buffalo, New York, but only stayed there thirty days. The family lived on military bases in Hawaii and California before settling in Antioch, Illinois. Lynn Szymoniak's father, a Marine Corps sharpshooter who served in World War II (at Guadalcanal) and Korea, left the family in the States after being assigned to duty in Japan, and when he returned home, he would come and go. Lynn's mom raised the family, working as a secretary at the State Bank of Antioch during the day; Lynn would help run the drive-through teller on weekends.

Antioch, a farm community on the Illinois-Wisconsin border, was barely visible on the map; they would turn on the stoplight on weekends. Lynn had a cloistered, small-town childhood, excelling at a strict Catholic girls' high school. She went to mass and took communion every morning and wore a uniform every day to class. Lynn earned a full scholarship to Bryn Mawr, one of the Seven Sisters liberal arts women's schools, located in the Philadelphia suburbs. The year was 1967, late in the 1960s but near the dawn of The Sixties. And a Catholic schoolgirl got her first taste of freedom.

It didn't take long for Lynn to become radicalized amid the freewheeling spirit on campus. She attended lectures by feminist author Kate Millett and took classes from Communist Party USA National Committee member Herbert Aptheker. One day Aptheker had his students sign a birthday card for Angela Davis while she languished in prison; he was Davis's godfather. Lynn protested to end the war, organized marches and school building takeovers, railed against racial and wealth disparities, and occasionally went to class. During what she would later call a “racial identity crisis,” Lynn spent a summer working for the Black Panther Party in Kansas City on a free community breakfast program. Her best friend at Bryn Mawr, Dianne, would eventually return to Kansas City and marry Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver's cousin.

On March 8, 1971, antiwar activists known as the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a field office in Media, Pennsylvania, liberating
files showing that agents had infiltrated and investigated student organizers and dissenters. One of the files was Lynn Szymoniak's. William Davidon, a friend and professor at nearby Haverford College who organized the burglary, asked Lynn at an antiwar rally a few days later if she wanted to see her file. Lynn said she just wanted it destroyed.

All that spring, a black sedan often parked outside Lynn's house on the Main Line, with the two men in suits inside making no effort to be inconspicuous. The men followed Lynn to campus and to her part-time waitressing job. Katherine McBride, the dean of Bryn Mawr, pulled Lynn out of class to tell her that the FBI considered her a suspect in the break-in. Lynn couldn't take it. One night she cut her blond hair short and dyed it black, climbed out of her back window, and drove off with a friend. They bought a bus ticket and fled to a commune in upstate New York.

A few months later, Lynn made it back to Antioch, working as a teller at the community bank with her mom. Within three days, the same FBI agents confronted her at the office. They told Lynn they had solid evidence she played a role in the break-in, and also accused her of burning down a draft board in Indiana. They interrogated her for hours in a bank conference room. Lynn initially refused to answer, and one of the agents retorted, “How do you think it would affect your father's recovery if we had to tell him about all this?” At the time, Lynn's father was holed up in a mental hospital, trying to shake off the latest in a series of nervous breakdowns that followed his military career. Lynn finally complied, detailing her activist and sexual exploits, to the delight of the prurient agents. But she never gave up Professor Davidon's secret.
In January 2014 the perpetrators finally revealed their role in the burglary, which led to the first-ever reforms of FBI domestic surveillance.

Lynn thought that was the end of her activist days.

Switching gears, Lynn left Antioch and wound up in a management training program for Bryn Mawr Trust Company back in Philadelphia. After a couple years, she noticed that she was the only female trainee, and the only one who never got promoted. She informed the bank of this, and they paid her to keep quiet and leave the program.

Using the bank's hush money, Lynn entered Villanova Law School, in one of the first classes that enrolled women. Mark Cullen, who would become the father of Lynn's children, met her at Villanova. After graduating
in 1976, Lynn and Mark took jobs at various legal aid societies, doing poverty and civil rights law. There was a stint at a battered women's shelter in Merion, Pennsylvania, and a period representing Choctaw Indians in eastern Oklahoma. Anything that allowed them to agitate for social change, they liked. Mark loved to watch Lynn stare down injustice, wheels turning, formulating a plan to fight.

The search for a cause brought Lynn and Mark to Florida Rural Legal Services in Palm Beach County in 1980. Migrant workers picking sugar cane in Belle Glade, on the western outskirts of the county, toiled under dreadful conditions. Farmers would prepare the fields by spraying them with defoliant and setting them ablaze. Lynn would drive along two-lane highways with lit-up fields on either side forming a tunnel of fire, running the windshield wipers to push away ash. She filed hazardous workplace cases for workers stricken with tuberculosis and lung disease; at one point Lynn and Mark tried to get Belle Glade declared a farm labor camp so it could be brought up to
those
minimal standards.

Florida Rural Legal Services got defunded within a year, and after opening a poverty law practice with Mark, Lynn left the firm and had three kids—Zach, Mark Elliot, and Molly—becoming less a flower child and more a mom. She shuttled through several jobs in academia and the corporate sector, always on the move, changing employers every three years. Eventually Lynn became senior litigation counsel for the National Council on Compensation Insurance, working to bust large corporations defrauding insurance companies and worker's compensation funds for millions of dollars. Rooting out corporate fraud had a link to the social justice impulse, even while assisting big insurers. And while training at the National Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, in a course taught by retired FBI agents, Lynn became a real white-collar crime buff. She liked working backward from the claims forms, analyzing documents, partnering with private investigators. She learned how to find fraud, and became quite adept at it.

The white-collar cases put Lynn in close contact with numerous FBI and U.S. attorney's offices, in particular several officials in the Middle District of Florida, in Jacksonville. She even taught a class in insurance fraud at the FBI Academy in Quantico. She and the fraud investigators would drink together and trade stories. The FBI agents would always refer to “Lynn's people” when talking about liberals—she couldn't shake her bleeding
heart—but they all got along. After working for a few other firms, Lynn opened her own law practice in Boca Raton, building an office with Mark that grew to twenty-five employees.

By 1998 Lynn achieved enough success to purchase a four-bedroom house for her and the kids in a gated community in Palm Beach Gardens, northwest of downtown. The house on Man O' War Road had an open plan and high ceilings, with a covered patio and a pool, on a handsome one-acre lot with palm trees. It was impossible to spend time there and not feel relaxed. But after purchasing the house, Lynn suffered a series of setbacks.

In 1999, Lynn was diagnosed with breast cancer. She waged a successful two-year battle, undergoing multiple surgeries and nine months of chemotherapy. The bills used up most of her fallback savings. Around the same time, she and Mark split up. They remained good friends—they even kept open the law firm after the breakup—but she got custody of the children. Meanwhile, Lynn's mother moved down from Antioch to stay with the family, and rapidly fell ill. She was diagnosed in 2006 with late-onset Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's at the age of eighty-eight, and Lynn became her caregiver. She had to pull back on litigation work and needed another source of income.

So many Floridians managed during this period by trading on home equity. Lynn used her house as an ATM, twice writing off her old loans and refinancing into bigger ones, while taking money out. She used some of the cash to engage in the state pastime of house flipping, trading multiple properties and winding up with an eighth-floor condo in a swanky downtown West Palm Beach building with a rooftop Jacuzzi and pool, which she used as an office when the law firm downsized. Lynn found another business venture through one of her insurance fraud buddies in Jacksonville. The U.S. attorney needed an expert witness to explain workers' compensation to a jury. Lynn testified in the case in early 2008. Word gets around in the small world of expert witnesses, and before long Lynn was flying to New York, South Carolina, and elsewhere to give testimony.

None of this alleviated the financial stress. And as the 2008 crash hit, insurance companies cut back on legal work. Meanwhile, Lynn's mother was deteriorating. She would forget to use her walker and fall down. Lynn or her son Zach, who went to college nearby and lived at home, would have to sleep on the couch near the bedroom in case her mother would wake up
at night. Sometimes the men tending to the yard would find her wandering the grounds, with no idea how to get back to the house.

Lynn thought about selling the big house and converting the office back into a condo. Throughout her childhood and professional career, she frequently moved on and started over. But Lynn promised her mom she would never stick her in a “hell-hole nursing home,” by God, and with the condo there wouldn't be any other choice. Getting her mom to use an elevator, managing cramped quarters: it just didn't seem like it could work. At the house, Mom had a perfect little life, with her own bedroom, her own bathroom. Her doctors were nearby. It was awful enough to watch the woman who raised Lynn, someone who solved the newspaper crossword puzzle every day of her life, fall apart mentally. But Lynn thought that if she couldn't keep the promise to stay by her mother's side as she lived out her days, nothing else made sense. So she dug in her heels, cutting her budget to the bone to keep making mortgage payments.