Chain of Title (24 page)

Lisa left Jenna with the babysitter and boarded the bus herself. A light rain fell as they motored up I-95, and Lisa watched raindrops collect on the bus windows. She met several people whom she knew only as case studies of foreclosure madness. They talked about their struggles, and their hopes that the trip would lead to something positive. Before long the night got the better of everyone, and they settled back for the long ride. The darkness and the rain imbued Lisa with an eerie calm as she prepared to intrude on the heart of Florida's political power and demand to be heard.

As day broke, the group stopped at a roadside Cracker Barrel to freshen up. Grace Rucci, whose son was in foreclosure in Palm Beach, walked into the bathroom and saw two children brushing their teeth; they were homeless and living in their family's car. Foreclosures hit the middle class in Florida; Rucci hadn't been exposed to real poverty like that. But it symbolized why she traveled eleven hours through the night: to help stop millions of others from experiencing the same fate.

The capitol in Tallahassee sits high on a hill, the rotunda and legislative office tower behind it visible for miles. Buses from east and west converged as the sun rose, stopping near the staging area in Waller Park, at the west
front of the capitol. The podium sat just above “Stormsong,” a local artist's statue of large metal dolphins frolicking over a working waterfall.

During the layover, Lisa changed into a blue suit jacket and shirt; a trademark bright green scarf held her hair in place. She disembarked and ascended the capitol steps, past a replica of the Liberty Bell. Michael found her and introduced his family to Lisa for the first time. As they waited for the rally to begin, they greeted other homeowners, as well as attorneys like Matt Weidner, Chip Parker, and April Charney. Cory Luttrell, a film student who jumped on the bus at the last minute, set up equipment to record the rally. The clouds cleared overnight, and the view from the steps, out toward the state supreme court, was all blue sky.

Matt Weidner emceed the rally, while Lisa and Michael held up signs with their website addresses on them; Ice Legal had a sign as well. Jennifer, Michael's wife, retreated into the crowd; this was her husband's moment, and she wanted a good view. “
We gotta give credit to the consumer activists that joined this fight,” Matt said, motioning to the homeowners behind the podium. He warned of bankers conspiring to remove fundamental due process rights, and how this battle would reverberate across the country.

State representative Darren Soto and state senator Dave Aronberg, who co-authored the Foreclosure Bill of Rights legislation, thanked attendees for their energy. “Your being here today is sending the message that we need to stand for people,” said Aronberg, who was in the midst of a campaign for state attorney general. Matt also introduced foreclosure defense attorney Chip Parker, who thundered at the mortgage industry's daily injustices: “We're living in the steroid era of foreclosures. The banks are juiced in order to win.” April Charney, in her understated drawl, argued that “foreclosure is a failed business model, and we need to stop it at the courthouse door.” If Florida went the way of California and Nevada, Charney said, homeowners' rights would be bulldozed and foreclosures would skyrocket. “Without our homeowners, we have nothing.”

The sign got too heavy for Lisa to hold, so she passed it off, but by that time her moment had arrived. Naturally, Michael nominated her to speak for homeowners. Since the NACA speech, Lisa started attending Toastmasters for public speaking tips. The leaders there instructed her that she had to expand her repertoire beyond foreclosures; Lisa responded, “But I'm only here to speak about one issue.” Matt Weidner introduced Lisa as a
“pro se
patriot, for all the work she's doing to spread the message that you have a right to defend your home.” And she stepped up to the microphone.

The most important part of the speech was the first line. “Hi, my name is Lisa Epstein and I am in foreclosure.” Power loomed behind the affirmation. She did not hide reality, safeguarding her credibility out of fear that everyone would stop listening to a deadbeat seeking a free home. She owned her struggle because only through that could she highlight the rot at the heart of the biggest market in the world. She owned it because shame was the tactic the mortgage industry used to sell mortgages to people who couldn't afford them and forge documents to take back the homes when it all unraveled. Only a raised voice could overcome that shame and help others reject humiliation.

Her voice cracked by the second line, but Lisa held it together. “I cannot believe that I am a citizen of a country that feels it is okay to evict millions upon millions upon millions of its citizens from the only homes that they have,” she said. Lisa said the titles were so dirty that property transfers would be maligned for the next fifty years, if not a century. “And I am here to say, defend your homes, America!”

Lisa used words she found etched in a display outside the Palm Beach County courthouse, among a series of quotations about the American justice system. Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator and orator, once said, “
The protection of life and property, trial by jury, the right of an open trial: these are principles of public liberty existing in the best form in the republican institutions in this country.”

“Now I don't know what happened, but that's etched in stone,” Lisa continued, “and when you go inside the building, we have banks producing fraudulent paperwork and showing them to judges that could never conceive that an officer of the court would show up with something so criminal and so fraudulent.” Lisa told of her days observing at the county courthouse and her efforts to educate judges about the fraud, including her comment to the state supreme court, whose building she could see from the podium. (“Isn't that just beautiful?” she remarked of the courthouse.) She explained how she never paid a bill late in her life, how she faxed her modification applications to Chase Home Finance for eight months, how she tried her best to stop this horror from being visited upon her and her family, to no avail. She even told the story of September 11, her voice trembling
again as she described the scene. “I could smell the jet fuel emanating from their bodies, and I saw the soot and glass particles in their eyes and in their skin. . . . And I thought this is the worst that I am ever going to see in my country. But I was wrong. Because that evil came from outside. And this evil was born within.”

She closed by inviting homeowners to join them in fighting pretender lenders, criminal entities coming to evict them with false documents. “We don't want free homes,” Lisa insisted. “We want to pay for our homes. We don't want to be victims, we don't want to be deadbeats, and we don't want to be taken advantage of anymore.”

Amid cheers, Lisa walked back toward Michael, smiling and raising her eyebrows. Michael nodded back. And then everyone went off to lobby.

The capitol was a hive of activity, with lawmakers, staffers, and lobbyists scurrying across the marble floors. Rally participants broke off to find their legislators. Lisa told everyone to deliver written copies of their stories if nobody was available to hear them. Some ended up briefing staff, while others got to speak directly with state representatives or senators. Lisa stressed to her legislators how the stereotype of the foreclosure deadbeat needed an update. Hard-working Floridians exposed to unemployment or medical debt fell victim to the crisis and naively trusted mortgage servicers or lending companies. “If I pulled any of the things they pulled, I'd be hit with felony criminal charges,” she told them. Michael stayed back with his family, handing in a written statement and coordinating other citizen lobbyists.

The Mortgage Justice Group was determined to confront Senator Bennett. First they were told they needed an appointment. But Bennett came out of his office and chatted amiably—until they mentioned the non-judicial foreclosure bill. As a homeowner named Tammy would later tell Michael, Bennett flipped out. “This is a wonderful bill! Why would you even want to fight for your home?” He stomped out of his office and down the hallway. The homeowners were stunned.

That day Bennett told a local news station that he put the non-judicial foreclosure bill on hold because the banking industry claimed he made it “
too easy to protect the consumer.” When Michael got back home, he posted a story on
PigsAss.org
listing
all of Bennett's campaign contributions from bankers, but it wasn't necessary.
The bill died in the Banking and Insurance
Committee on the final day of the legislative session, nine days after the Rally in Tally.

Whether it was the Freedom Ride imagery, the novelty of citizen-organized protest in a state known more for political apathy, or the sight of digital warriors leaving their houses and hitting the streets, the Rally in Tally got the media's attention.
Television stations from Pensacola and Tampa Bay,
local radio stations, and
print outlets like the
Sunshine State News, Tampa Tribune
, and
Tampa Bay Times
all covered it, pushing something previously confined to niche blogs into the living rooms and onto the front porches of many Floridians. Michael described the rally at
4closureFraud
as the culmination of “
one of the most influential months we have seen in the fight for justice since we started our crusade.” And, he added, “May will be more interesting than April.”

15

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

You don't live through a south Florida summer: you
endure
it. Clothing clings to sticky bodies, and the air is so thick it could be weighed on a scale. Everybody just slows down.

The foreclosure fighters powered through the heat to keep the momentum going. They had no choice, as the horrors piled up.
Rick and Sherry Rought of Gowen, Michigan, filed federal suit after Deutsche Bank broke into the home they purchased in a foreclosure auction, took their possessions, and changed the locks. Deutsche Bank said it thought the house was still abandoned. In another trash-out mix-up,
Bank of America stole a woman's pet parrot.
Glazy and Jose Ruscalleda had two lenders seeking to repossess their Miami condo, both claiming to hold the note.
Keith and Julie Hanover never missed a payment, and Bank of America wasn't their lender, but the bank served them with a foreclosure notice anyway. The Great Foreclosure Machine also produced tragedy: police in Houston found a married couple shot to death in a murder/suicide.
The note blamed the deaths on an imminent foreclosure.

At
Fraud Digest
, Lynn posted highlights of a case granted summary judgment in Pinellas County, where the judge learned that a different plaintiff was also pursuing summary judgment on the same home. Both plaintiffs filed an affidavit in support of summary judgment signed by the
same
robo-signer, as an officer of two separate corporations. Judge Anthony Rondolino, upon hearing the news, informed the plaintiff's attorney, “
I don't have any confidence that any of the documents the Court's receiving on these mass foreclosures are valid.”

The most terrifying story that summer concerned Keith Sadler of Stony Ridge, Ohio. Sadler faced foreclosure on a home he owned for twenty years, and he decided not to leave. With six members of an ad hoc group called the Toledo Foreclosure Defense League, Sadler barricaded the doors with PVC piping. Sadler webcast live from inside the house for six days, saying he wanted to wake up the nation, and
Foreclosure Hamlet
members linked to it. On May 7 a Wood County sheriff's SWAT team stormed the house, guns drawn, pushing everyone to the ground. The group was charged with obstruction of justice and criminal trespassing.
Activists seethed that government resources were put into pulling people out of their homes while the real criminals went free.

Michael and Lisa highlighted these stories, as they had for months. But something changed after the Rally in Tally. National media still didn't care, but Florida reporters dug through Lisa and Michael's archives, finding leads for stories. One was Paola Iuspa-Abbott of the Miami trade publication
Daily Business Review
. A native of Argentina, Iuspa-Abbott recalled how breakdowns in the Argentinian legal system in the 1970s led to dictatorship and chaos. She believed the system was being similarly corrupted in the United States.

Iuspa-Abbott read a
4closureFraud
report about
John Watson, a foreclosure defense attorney in Fort Lauderdale, who also represented mortgage servicer Aurora. He had foreclosure clients who were fighting Aurora, giving him an interest in both sides of the lawsuit. Watson's brother, Marshall C. Watson, ran one of the largest foreclosure mills in the state (they were the firm in Lynn Szymoniak's case). John Watson's clients confronted him over these ties, and he claimed no relationship with his brother's foreclosure mill, even though his address, office phone, and email were routed through Marshall C. Watson's firm. Iuspa-Abbott re-reported the
4closureFraud
account, adding that the homeowners filed a complaint to recoup the attorney fees they paid to Watson.
Daily Business Review
was not a likely candidate to break foreclosure fraud news, because much of its revenue derived from publishing notices of foreclosure from the law firms. But there was a wall between editorial and advertising, and Iuspa-Abbott had documented proof, so
Daily Business Review
ran the story.

A
Palm Beach Post
writer, Kim Miller, was watching, too. Miller had just transferred from the higher education desk and expected little from the real
estate beat, just boring stories on home sales reports. But she found Lisa and Michael's sites, and they became primary sources. Lisa would send Miller email tips and find them in the newspaper a few days later. Miller wished she learned all this earlier: she and her husband bought a house at the top of the bubble, in 2005.

It wasn't just reporters. Insiders at a couple of foreclosure mills contacted Lisa, who started having clandestine meetings with them in restaurants. They felt guilty about what was happening but could only give hints, which Lisa ultimately couldn't prove. One insider told Lisa their mill lost an entire filing cabinet full of original notes.

Someone from MERS's communications department left a comment at
4closureFraud
insisting that MERS did not support filing lost note affidavits, even though they were found in MERS cases.
Michael annotated the comment with a GIF of a cartoon character lighting himself on fire.
Michael then found a private Facebook group for ex-DocX employees, and he published the Facebook pages of Brittany Snow, Tywanna Thomas, Korell Harp, and even the company's CEO, Lorraine O'Reilly Brown. A commenter named “Concerned” criticized Michael for making insinuations about the group. Michael pulled up his IP address; “Concerned” was writing from a DocX facility. A few DocX employees privately contacted Michael, asking him to take down the post because they didn't want future employers to see their names associated with fraud. Michael had no sympathy. To him, their job resulted in innocent people losing their homes, and he did not feel compelled to be nice about it.

Commenters sympathetic to banks—or perhaps industry-paid shills—claimed that Michael and Lisa were using technicalities to luck their way into free houses. If you didn't pay, they said, you should go. Lisa wasn't even living in her house at the time, so she always found that amusing. But the misaligned moral responsibility, where homeowners had to sacrifice everything to make payments in a depressed economy but companies without proof of ownership could use bogus documents to kick them out with impunity, angered her.

There used to be a social contract attached to the mortgage contract: borrowers agreed to pay no matter their hardships, and lenders agreed to foreclose only as a last resort. Borrowers still bore the first compulsion. Most of the homeowners Lisa interacted with demonstrated a deep desire
to save their homes, saying they would forgo food or electricity or medical attention to make the mortgage payment. It made no rational or financial sense to plow through savings when the loan was designed to fail. But homeowners, their emotions poured into their homes, didn't care.

The same moral compulsion did not influence lenders, who drove homeowners into foreclosure with underhanded tactics designed to fatten their profits, and used phony documents to finish the job. Industry leaders warned of “strategic defaults,” where homeowners deliberately missed payments to secure a government-supported loan modification. But it almost never happened, because homeowners could not be certain of receiving a modification and the consequences of default were so drastic. In fact, the highest-profile strategic default that summer came from the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group for the lending industry, which walked away from its ten-story headquarters in Washington. Its spokesman argued just a few months earlier that borrowers had to keep paying. The spokesman asked, “
What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends” if they defaulted? Indeed.

Some veterans of the foreclosure fraud blogosphere grumbled about the new wave's lack of credentials and its flair for grabbing attention. Steve Dibert, a loan auditor and former mortgage broker, considered rhetorical flourishes about tearing down the banking system simplistic, if not dangerous. He particularly had a problem with Neil Garfield overpromising that
pro se
litigants could win based on demanding notes or other strategies. In blog posts,
he characterized Garfield as an Elmer Gantry–like figure, selling false hopes the courts would extinguish. Of course, Dibert also took on clients to help avoid foreclosure, but he claimed to give them more realistic expectations.

Foreclosure Hamlet
regulars defended Garfield, noting that Dibert used to post at
Living Lies
, trolling for customers for his loan audits. Others claimed Dibert ripped people off when he was a broker, implicating him in the same system he was now fighting. Dibert shot back, calling the Garfield supporters uninformed amateurs, though he did say, “
I won't hold it against Lisa Epstein who operates
Foreclosure Hamlet
because she is pretty cool.”
Huffington Post
blogger Richard Zombeck sided with Dibert after Lisa asked him if he could request a Palm Beach County courthouse press pass for her, so she could film rocket docket cases. Zombeck thought the foreclosure
fighters were asking him to lie to his editors, and he decided they were dilettantes. Battle lines were being drawn within the blogosphere.

Michael's willingness to attack led to collateral damage. Lisa was observing in court one day when Judge Meenu Sasser, out of nowhere, said, “Ms. Epstein, approach the bench!” Lisa uneasily wedged through the packed room of attorneys to the podium; she had nothing scheduled in her case that day. “I just want to let you know that civility and respect are very important to me,” Judge Sasser said sternly. “And disrespect like you've shown is intolerable.” After the dressing-down, a couple of attorneys asked Lisa what that was all about. “I have no idea,” she replied.

Lisa called Dustin Zacks at Ice Legal, who in May became her defense attorney. Ice had its own run-ins with Judge Sasser—
the firm's lawyers claimed she treated them with hostility—but they didn't understand why she would attack Lisa in open court. The next call she made was to Michael, who said, “Oh, yeah, that's probably my fault.”
That day Michael posted Judge Sasser's financial records, which any candidate for judicial election had to submit. The statements showed several mutual fund investments associated with banks, including equity stock in Bank of America.
Though Ice Legal used the equity stock holding to try to get Judge Sasser disqualified from a Bank of America case, most mutual funds have some banking investments in them.
To some, particularly Steve Dibert, the charges were gratuitous. But, lacking resources or power, Michael felt he had to call people out to get noticed.

Judge Sasser thought Lisa ran Michael's website, so she blasted her. A few weeks earlier, Sasser had denied Lisa's motion to dismiss her case. Impugning a judge's integrity was a sure way to lose cases. Michael put Lisa in a difficult spot, and future trips to Judge Sasser's courtroom became significantly more uncomfortable. But Lisa didn't recoil from the courthouse.

She started Moratorium Monday, a weekly call for a pause to foreclosures, so document fraud could be thoroughly assessed and a workable solution found to keep people in their homes. The protests weren't that large—five to ten people at most—but for months Lisa never missed a Monday, passing out leaflets and holding up signs.

Moratorium Monday often had a three-year-old participant: Jenna. Lisa couldn't afford to constantly leave her daughter with a babysitter. More important, too many nights were spent in front of screens, Lisa at the computer
buried in research, Jenna left to television. Lisa had a profound desire to raise a child, even enduring a miscarriage to get there. Now she was losing her connection to motherhood because of an unrelated passion. So Jenna would come to Moratorium Monday with a sign and her own set of chants: “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” “Stop the looting, start the prosecuting!” They were just a pile of words to her, but fun to yell in public. One day Jenna showed off these chants at her babysitter and “second mom” Mary Delaguila's house, and Mary's son said, “Mom, how come you don't teach me any cool songs like that?”

Lisa brought Jenna inside the courtroom as well, finding her a spot on the benches to lie flat; the scar from the spina bifida surgery was still sensitive. Jenna would happily lie next to her mother, oblivious to the legal proceedings; Lisa would buy her an ice cream sandwich at the commissary. Others joined Lisa at court periodically, from Lynn to Grace Rucci to James Elder (“Jazzy” on
Foreclosure Hamlet
). But Jenna was her favorite companion.

To Lisa, the attorneys and bailiffs and file clerks were co-workers. But her reputation at the courthouse evolved after she filed an amicus brief in an HSBC case that contained one of the BOGUS documents. “
A BOGUS ASSIGNMENT OF MORTGAGE filed in the public records is a key piece of information,” Lisa wrote in the brief, “leading to conditions that make it difficult to identify the true owner of the property, to transfer title to another, for subsequent owners to obtain title insurance, and for an unbroken chain of possession to be determined.”

Trial courts in Florida were not set up to receive an amicus brief; that was an appellate court technique. So the only strategy available was to file a motion to have the brief accepted. Lisa filed two motions, one in Port St. Lucie and one in Palm Beach.

At a hearing for the motion in Palm Beach, the bank's attorney kneeled down beside Lisa and asked, “Are you the homeowner?”

“No.”

“Are you an attorney?”

“No, I have an amicus brief.”

Lisa handed the attorney a hundred-page report, which included LPS's financial disclosure tying it to DocX, an old study on missing mortgage documents, the BOGUS assignment, and her amicus brief.

The attorney flipped through a few pages and said, “I'm going to step outside and call my office.”

Bank attorneys always looked at her sideways after that. But anytime Lisa showed up in court, attorneys and judges paid a bit more attention to the law, or at least gave it more lip service. Maybe it didn't alter rulings, but it did make the Great Foreclosure Machine creak a little.