Chain of Title (18 page)

The last refinance Lynn made, with a company called Option One, was a “2-28” loan, where the interest rate would reset upward after two years. Per the mortgage contract, Option One had to make the adjustment by March 1, 2008, or else wait until September. They missed the March 1 deadline but then adjusted the loan at the end of the month, increasing the monthly payment by nearly $1,000. This would have cost Lynn around $6,000 in extra interest; more important to a stickler lawyer, it represented a breach of contract. If Lynn allowed this, she thought, Option One could change her payment whenever and however they wished. Lynn protested the adjustment, but the lender wouldn't listen. So in an attempt to gain leverage, she stopped paying the mortgage at the new rate.

Lynn got sued for foreclosure in July 2008, by “Deutsche Bank National Trust Company as Trustee for Soundview Home Loan Trust 2006 OPT-2,” an indecipherable mystery to her. Deutsche Bank filed a lost note affidavit but nonetheless asserted standing to foreclose.
Lynn hired her ex, Mark Cullen, as her lawyer, and they attempted to have the case dismissed because Deutsche Bank did not attach the mortgage or the note to the complaint. As per usual in any case defendants actually challenged, the bank took no action for a long time. A natural investigator, Lynn began to dig into the situation. She found a lot of cases like hers: mortgages adjusting at the wrong time, unknown entities named as plaintiffs. Lynn trekked the same online
route as Lisa and Michael and other victims, learning about mortgage-backed trusts and securitization FAIL and Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Machine.

After her mother died in mid-2009—she did live out her life in that Palm Beach Gardens home, dying on her birthday—Lynn put the home on the market. But by that point the housing crisis was in full swing, and her chance to sell vanished. Lynn began to see the devastation in her own gated neighborhood: U-Hauls in the driveways, washing machines on the front lawn, abandoned homes, shattered lives. She figured she'd be another one of those suckers soon enough. She was just hoping to walk away without any debt.

Finally, on the day after Christmas, 2009, with her kids all home for the holidays, Lynn got her knock at the door. Miraculously, Deutsche Bank found the note. They also found the mortgage assignment, certifying the legal transfer from American Home Mortgage Servicing—another new name—to Deutsche Bank. Lynn had never filled out a check to either one of these companies, but they were passing her mortgage back and forth. American Home Mortgage Servicing was listed in the notice of filing as “successor-in-interest” to her lender, Option One. But something else on the assignment caught Lynn's attention: the effective date, October 17, 2008. That was three months
after
Deutsche Bank filed for foreclosure. Just as in Lisa Epstein's case, at the time of the foreclosure filing
Deutsche Bank didn't yet own the loan over which they sued her.
I don't think so
, Lynn thought. She dialed Mark Cullen, who was representing her in the case. “Merry Christmas,” he answered with a smile in his voice.

“They served me the notice of filing,” Lynn said breathlessly. “But something's wrong here. The date on the assignment says Deutsche Bank acquired the loan three months after they sued me.”

“Oh, really?” The words just hung there. Mark had tried only a couple of foreclosure cases, but while he knew all about the dodgy paperwork, judges evinced very little sympathy for delinquent borrowers they perceived as deadbeats. Anyway, Mark's usual response to his clients' overexcitement was to try to calm them down. He told Lynn he would take a look at the papers when he went back to the office. “I know you think I'm nuts, but I'll call you back,” Lynn said, clicking off the cell phone. Mark heard that familiar intensity in her voice.

Lynn went into the kitchen to pour herself some coffee. She was going to be here a while.

She pulled out her laptop and set it on the dining room table. Through a little Googling, Lynn ascertained that
American Home Mortgage Servicing acquired Option One in mid-2008, after Lynn stopped paying; that explained why she never sent them a check. But she didn't know anything else about the company. Through her work, Lynn had access to a database called Accurint, basically a more sophisticated form of LexisNexis. The mortgage assignment featured a notary stamp from Fulton County, Georgia, so Lynn ran a business search in Georgia for American Home Mortgage Servicing. Nothing turned up, in Fulton County or anywhere else. American Home Mortgage Servicing executed the assignment, but they had no offices in the state where the paperwork was notarized.

Linda Green signed the assignment as vice president of American Home Mortgage Servicing. That name was too common for Lynn to work with. But one of the witnesses on the document, Korell Harp, would fit the bill. Was it too invasive to run a background search on the poor office worker who signed her mortgage document? Maybe. But Lynn the homeowner receded into the background. Lynn the investigator had control now. Twenty years of training taught her to dig deeper, to follow the chain back and deconstruct the facts. She wasn't going to stop.

Lynn typed “Korell Harp” into Accurint. Up popped someone who at one point lived in Barnesville, Georgia. She read his address and work history, none of which mentioned American Home Mortgage Servicing. But there was this: Korell Harp had an arrest record for a federal crime. Lynn switched over to PACER, the database that contains federal legal pleadings. As a lawyer, Lynn would often run names through PACER to search for outstanding litigation or criminal records.
She found that Korell Harp was charged with identity theft in Oklahoma in January 2009. That was three months after he signed her document.

Lynn poked around some other databases for more information about Korell. If the charges were filed in December, he may have been arrested earlier. Finally Lynn landed on the website
mugshots.com
. She typed in Korell Harp, locating his mug shot and booking number. On the date in October
2008 when he allegedly witnessed the mortgage assignment,
Korell Harp was in state prison in Oklahoma.

Korell Harp may have committed identity theft, but somebody had stolen
his
identity, using it to sign mortgage documents that were submitted to courts as evidence to take people's homes. To take
Lynn's
home. Plus the documents were notarized in a state where none of the companies involved had any branch offices. And the dates were all wrong.

The copy of Lynn's promissory note included an allonge—a strip of paper, separate from the note, that included the most recent endorsements. Allonges weren't supposed to be used unless room ran out on both sides of the original note, but they were commonplace during the crisis, as they were easier to fabricate. Allonges were also supposed to be permanently affixed to the note, but the corner had no staple holes or other signs of attachment. In fact, nothing on the allonge looked official, except a line at the top with a Palm Beach County “book and page number.” That meant a corresponding allonge must be on file at the county courthouse. Book 19933, Page 1827.

Mark Elliot Cullen, twenty-three, one of Lynn's two sons, walked lazily into the living room, stretching his neck to work out the kinks after a night's sleep.

“Come on, we're going to the courthouse,” Lynn said to her son.

“It's the day after Christmas.”

“Good, that means there won't be a crowd.”

In the courthouse file room, Lynn asked the desk clerk for Book 19933. The clerk went into the back and returned with a large binder.

Lynn flipped to page 1827.
What she found there wasn't the allonge but the first page of her original mortgage with Option One. She took out what Deutsche Bank sent her and compared it to the document on page 1827.
Why didn't I notice that before?
she thought. There was a strip across the top and bottom of the allonge, with some words cut off along the bottom. Lynn had seen this in phony tax returns. Somebody at Deutsche Bank, or whoever they outsourced this work to, copied the first page of the mortgage in an attempt to make the allonge look legitimate, and then did a cut-and-paste job. Not a digital cut-and-paste with Photoshop, but a literal one: someone cut off the top part of the page, taped it to another piece of paper, and
photocopied that, adding the endorsement signature. But the line across the top and bottom, residue from the bad tape job, gave away the game. When Lynn lined up Page 1827 with the allonge, it was an exact match.

Deutsche Bank or American Home Mortgage Servicing never attached a new allonge to the note; this was a fabricated endorsement mocked up after the fact. Adding the book and page number simply made it look official. Lynn figured they probably just had one allonge they copied over and over whenever they came across a note that needed an endorsement. Who but Lynn would bother to check the documents?

Lynn returned the book and page binder to the desk clerk. “I need an affidavit from you that says this is what's really at this book and page number,” she said.

“Sure, but you know you don't have to come down here to look all this up, right?”

“What do you mean?” Lynn said.

“You can search public documents online.”

Lynn brightened. She turned to her son. “Mark, come on—we're going home!”

When they arrived home, Lynn informed Mark Elliot that the dining room would remain off-limits for the rest of the day. She had work to do.

To a fraud investigator, finding a searchable public records database for mortgage documents was like finding a pot of gold. Lynn started at the Palm Beach County site by looking up every mortgage assignment from American Home Mortgage Servicing around the same date as hers, October 2008. Dozens popped up. A few of them had Linda Green signing as vice president of American Home Mortgage Servicing. But in one document Linda Green was listed as vice president of MERS. Lynn didn't yet know what MERS was, but she wondered how Linda Green could be vice president of two different companies at the same time.

So she looked for mortgages containing the name Linda Green. This resembled how Lynn would handle insurance fraud investigations, searching for patterns in files prepared simultaneously by the same people. It turned out that Lynn got it wrong—Linda Green was not vice president of two different financial institutions.
She was vice president of at least a dozen, according to signatures all over the official Palm Beach County
records. Korell Harp's name kept appearing in different job titles as well, sometimes as witness, sometimes as vice president, despite being in the slammer in Oklahoma the entire time. And other familiar names repeated themselves, all with different job titles depending on which company assigned the mortgage.

The Linda Green documents shared one thing in common: at the top of the page, they said that DocX, a company from Alpharetta, Georgia, prepared them. The notary stamps came from Georgia as well. What if Linda Green didn't work for any of these banks, but worked for DocX? What relationship did DocX have to these banks and mortgage companies? And what was MERS?

Lynn decided the only way her lawyer or anyone else would ever believe her would be to physically stick these documents in front of their noses.

She called to her family, “I'm headed to OfficeMax!”

Lynn returned home from OfficeMax with reams of paper and several ink cartridges. She planned to print out every DocX document she could find, and compare them for patterns. Lynn moved her operation into the dining room, and for the next thirty-six hours, the hum of the laser printing process rang throughout the house, all day and all night, much to the chagrin of the three kids trying to sleep upstairs. Lynn herself didn't sleep during Christmas week.

Mark Cullen read the notice of filing at the office, finding the same fishiness with the fabricated allonge. He tried to re-create the allonge on the office copier and couldn't manage it. Mark also had Deutsche Bank's motion for summary judgment, and the allonge in there was different from the allonge in the notice of filing, lacking the strip across the top and the bottom. Though their forgery skills improved, Deutsche Bank's skills in presenting evidence hadn't: it filed two separate allonges in the same court case. Mark hadn't seen such a blatant example of evidence tampering in his legal career.

Since 2004 Lynn maintained a blog called
Fraud Digest
, mainly so she could stockpile details about past cases. At first she only let friends access it, but later she made it public, as a promotional vehicle for her litigation and expert witness careers. The site usually contained information about insurance companies, letters of credit, or workers' compensation
fraud.
In the last week of 2009
Fraud Digest
featured articles like “DocX Mortgage Assignments Filed in Palm Beach County, FL (A-H).” Site visitors could peruse an alphabetic listing of every individual with a DocX mortgage assignment in the county, cross-referenced by date. There were hundreds and hundreds of names. And Lynn was churning out hard copies on three-hole-punch paper, fitting them into binders.

By the end of this thirty-six-hour period, Lynn found that Linda Green acted as the vice president of more than twenty mortgage servicing companies in just one month in 2009. She listed the names of those companies
in a separate
Fraud Digest
article. And she highlighted other frequent signers, like Tywanna Thomas and Christina Huang. These names, which meant nothing to Lynn a couple of days ago, now became the most important people in her life.

Then Lynn started to focus on the signatures. On one assignment, Linda Green's signature was very smushed, with a large loop for the
L
, a sharp line for the
d
, and a hastily scribbled last name. The next one had a perfectly legible
Linda
and a proper cursive
G
. A third was mostly illegible except for the
G
in
Green
(see below).