Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Saturday, March 23, 2013
ChaseMeNails Homemade Nail Polish.
http://www.madnoodle.com/store/products/25-chase-me-nails-gift-card/
(Just copy and paste link...seriously, you can't beat this deal with a stick!)
Yup, my marketing team have lost their minds... $7.50 for a $25 gift certificate HOLY COW!!
(Just copy and paste link...seriously, you can't beat this deal with a stick!)
Yup, my marketing team have lost their minds... $7.50 for a $25 gift certificate HOLY COW!!
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Jamie Dimon Agrees with Occupy Wall Street: 'Too Much Inequality'
Jamie Dimon Agrees With Occupy Wall Street: 'Too Much Inequality'
by , Mar 20th 2013 6:00PM
According to Chris Otts of The Courier-Journal, Dimon told his audience that the United States has "too much inequality." This isn't a novel insight -- the Occupy Wall Street protests were predicated on this idea, expressed through the slogan "we are the 99 percent" -- but it's striking to hear it coming from Wall Street's most outspoken defender of financial elites.
"It doesn't mean we blame the successful," Dimon continued, sounding more characteristic, "but it's true. You want to have problems in society? Have inequality." Dimon mentioned "struggling inner-city public schools" in particular, Otts reports.
The statements represent a slight rhetorical softening for Dimon, who has in the past rejected the anti-banker sentiment that arose after the financial crisis of 2008. "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it," he said in late 2011 at an investors' conference in New York. Since then, a lot has changed for JPMorgan: the bank, seen as the most successful of the financial behemoths during the crisis, was recently the subject of a "riveting and devastating" Senate panel report that accused Dimon and other executives of hiding trading losses from investors and regulators.
According to The New York Times, a criminal investigation of this affair -- known popularly, after the trader who caused the losses, as "the London Whale" -- is "at an advanced stage."
Over at AlterNet, Lynn Stuart Parramore traces "The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Jamie Dimon, Wall Street's Golden Boy," presenting his life story as "a critique of the American Dream." Dimon, she argues, was singularly concerned with pursuing wealth, although in his early days as JPM CEO he "was widely perceived as a smart and cautious leader, shrewdly avoiding many of the fancy financial engineering tricks that were all the rage on Wall Street." And a society that has long viewed material flourishing as a sign of God's favor -- perhaps in some secularized form, more recently -- embraced the "success" Dimon so often touts, along with his self-professed prudence (embodied by his favorite catchphrase, "fortress balance sheet"), as a sign of goodness. President Barack Obama, for instance, held up JPMorgan and its leader as exemplars of American finance: "there are a lot of banks that are actually pretty well managed," the president said in Feb. 2009, explaining why his administration did not seek to replace executives at bailed-out firms, "JPMorgan being a good example. Jamie Dimon, the CEO there, I don't think should be punished for doing a pretty good job managing an enormous portfolio." (That balance sheet, incidentally, is by now almost one-ninth the size of the U.S. economy.)
Those days of public favor are over. Particularly damning is a report by Johsua Rosner, a longtime chronicler of Wall Street malfeasance, succinctly entitled "JPMorgan Chase: Out of Control." The blog Naked Capitalism called it "astonishing"; as one reads the report, writer David Dayen averred, "it's hard to see the bank as anything but a criminal racket just days away form imploding, were it not propped up by implicit bailout guarantees and light-touch regulators."
All of this might have been on Dimon's mind when he gave Tuesday's keynote, adopting a tone more in line with the concerns of ordinary Americans, while not exactly abandoning his defensive stance regarding "success". What Dimon has yet to do, at least publicly, is acknowledge the connection between anger at the banks and dismay at the consequences of inequality: namely, that public subsidy of financial institutions -- which, according to Bloomberg, consumes about three cents of every tax dollar collected -- diverts resources that might otherwise be applied toward socially useful ends. For instance, funding those struggling inner-city schools.
*****************************************************************************
I would love to but in my opinion here, but I digress, I'm sitting here waiting for Chase to get back to me...so I'm a bit pre-occupied to throw up right now.
Executive Summary JPM Out Of Control
http://www.scribd.com/doc/130290952/Gf-Co-Executive-Summary-JPM-Out-of-Control
The most interesting read to date.
The most interesting read to date.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Creative Outlet for a Very Long Week Waiting for JPM. #Inspire #Create #NailPolish #NonToxic
Ready for some good news? Yeah, me too.
We have made some progress...but until I can "officially" say anything...I've been keeping myself busy with nail polish, work, and planning for some fun things. :)
:)
http://www.chasemenails.com
http://instagram.com/chasemenails
We have made some progress...but until I can "officially" say anything...I've been keeping myself busy with nail polish, work, and planning for some fun things. :) 
:)
http://www.chasemenails.com
http://instagram.com/chasemenails
Monday, March 18, 2013
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Husband, wife found dead in Chesterfield. Murder-Suicide caused by Foreclosure.
Husband, wife found dead in Chesterfield murder-suicide
Police: It appears husband shot wife, set fires, then shot himself
Posted: Saturday, March 16, 2013 12:00 am
|
Updated: 12:07 am, Sat Mar 16, 2013.
A husband and wife who police said were having marital problems
were found fatally shot inside their burning home late Thursday as the
apparent result of a murder-suicide.
The bodies of the couple, identified as Walter M. Hester Jr., 50, and his wife, Clara M. Morgan-Hester, 46, were discovered on different floors of their two-story house after firefighters responded to a fire inside at 11:30 p.m., police said.
Investigators said evidence suggests Hester shot his wife and set several fires in the residence before turning the handgun on himself. Family members told police that one of the two had discussed leaving the other, and police said they believe that prompted the events leading to the shootings and fire.
Police said they could find no documented history of domestic violence at the family’s home, which is in the 2000 block of Castle Glen Court, just off Providence Road West and a short distance north of Rockwood Park.
Chesterfield police Lt. Randy Horowitz said the weapon used was a handgun that police believe was Hester’s. The couple had a teenage son who was not home at the time of the shootings and is now staying with relatives, Horowitz said.
The family had lived at the cul-de-sac home since purchasing it in 2004, county real estate records show.
But it went into foreclosure Oct. 25, according to listings on Richmond BizSense.com.
Hester was self-employed doing landscaping and yard work; Morgan-Hester worked for an area bank, Horowitz said.
Chesterfield firefighters were called to respond to reports of a house fire late Thursday, and the first units on the scene found smoke and fire coming from the structure. The blaze was brought under control in 20-25 minutes, said Lt. Jason Elmore with Chesterfield Fire & EMS.
“The fire was in several areas of the house. It wasn’t contained to one area,” said Elmore, who added that the areas where fire was found were not adjoining.
Elmore said the bulk of the fire was just inside the front door, although investigators were continuing their attempts to establish the point of the fire’s origin.
“We don’t have a specific area of origin right now,” Elmore said early Friday morning. “It’s possible there could be multiple origins.”
After the fire was brought under control, firefighters were able to begin an interior search of the house, and they found the two bodies.
“I believe one was on the first floor and one was on the second,” he said.
As investigators worked at the scene, broken windows were visible on the first and second floors, and there was fire debris and torn vinyl siding outside the residence, including a pile just outside the front door.
Yellow police tape surrounded the home, which is in a neighborhood of well-maintained colonials and Cape Cods.
Several neighbors said they were stunned by the deaths of the Hesters, whom they described as a fairly typical married couple.
“They were very quiet,” said Lara Leyendecker. “I never heard them arguing. They kept their yard nice and their house nice.”
“This is just really … ” she said, her voice trailing off. “What can you say?”
jmackena@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6331
mbowes@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6450
Staff writer Reed Williams
contributed to this report.
The bodies of the couple, identified as Walter M. Hester Jr., 50, and his wife, Clara M. Morgan-Hester, 46, were discovered on different floors of their two-story house after firefighters responded to a fire inside at 11:30 p.m., police said.
Investigators said evidence suggests Hester shot his wife and set several fires in the residence before turning the handgun on himself. Family members told police that one of the two had discussed leaving the other, and police said they believe that prompted the events leading to the shootings and fire.
Police said they could find no documented history of domestic violence at the family’s home, which is in the 2000 block of Castle Glen Court, just off Providence Road West and a short distance north of Rockwood Park.
Chesterfield police Lt. Randy Horowitz said the weapon used was a handgun that police believe was Hester’s. The couple had a teenage son who was not home at the time of the shootings and is now staying with relatives, Horowitz said.
The family had lived at the cul-de-sac home since purchasing it in 2004, county real estate records show.
But it went into foreclosure Oct. 25, according to listings on Richmond BizSense.com.
Hester was self-employed doing landscaping and yard work; Morgan-Hester worked for an area bank, Horowitz said.
Chesterfield firefighters were called to respond to reports of a house fire late Thursday, and the first units on the scene found smoke and fire coming from the structure. The blaze was brought under control in 20-25 minutes, said Lt. Jason Elmore with Chesterfield Fire & EMS.
“The fire was in several areas of the house. It wasn’t contained to one area,” said Elmore, who added that the areas where fire was found were not adjoining.
Elmore said the bulk of the fire was just inside the front door, although investigators were continuing their attempts to establish the point of the fire’s origin.
“We don’t have a specific area of origin right now,” Elmore said early Friday morning. “It’s possible there could be multiple origins.”
After the fire was brought under control, firefighters were able to begin an interior search of the house, and they found the two bodies.
“I believe one was on the first floor and one was on the second,” he said.
As investigators worked at the scene, broken windows were visible on the first and second floors, and there was fire debris and torn vinyl siding outside the residence, including a pile just outside the front door.
Yellow police tape surrounded the home, which is in a neighborhood of well-maintained colonials and Cape Cods.
Several neighbors said they were stunned by the deaths of the Hesters, whom they described as a fairly typical married couple.
“They were very quiet,” said Lara Leyendecker. “I never heard them arguing. They kept their yard nice and their house nice.”
“This is just really … ” she said, her voice trailing off. “What can you say?”
jmackena@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6331
mbowes@timesdispatch.com
(804) 649-6450
Staff writer Reed Williams
contributed to this report.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Wells Fargo CEO confronted over Foreclosure Policies.
Wells Fargo CEO Meets a Desperate Homeowner Facing Foreclosure, Flees
Wells
Fargo Bank CEO John Stumpf’s keynote speech to the American Banker
Retail Lending Conference on Thursday morning didn’t quite work out like
he (or anyone else) expected. Midway through his address, single mom
Betty Badro calmly walked up on the stage to confront him over Wells
Fargo’s foreclosure polices.Ms. Badro, who has worked for the State of California for 22 years, attempted to deliver a personal check to the CEO, and tried to explain that she was hoping to forestall a scheduled foreclosure of her home tomorrow, March 15th. Not saying another word, Mr. Stumpf turned his back on Ms. Badro and left the stage.
After months of trying to get Wells Fargo to consider a loan modification, Ms. Badro explained she felt that going to the top man was the only way she could protect the lives of her disabled brother and one of her two children.
She got into trouble with the bank after suffering financial setbacks due to state furloughs and personal health issues. Her finances have now recovered, a HUD-certified housing counselor has reviewed her case, and believes that Ms. Badro qualifies for a loan modification.
After the Wells Fargo CEO left the stage at the luxurious Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Badro was joined by fifty members of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), the Home Defenders League, and Occupy Fights Foreclosures. The group attempted to explain to those in attendance how Wells Fargo has failed the community and the changes that Wells Fargo should make in their foreclosure practices. The audience followed Stumpf’s lead, packing up and leaving.
Thursday’s event was part of a broader campaign of ACCE and the Home Defenders League to push Wells Fargo to change their practices in order to reduce foreclosures. The groups are calling on Wells Fargo to:
• Make principal reduction a core front-end strategy when considering loan modifications;
• Release data on race & income of the homeowners they foreclose on, evict or assist.
• Stop all foreclosures and evictions stop until these steps are put into place.
On Tuesday ACCE released California in Crisis: How Wells Fargo’s Foreclosure Pipeline Is Damaging Local Communities,
a report documenting the bank’s failure to negotiate in good faith with
financially distressed home owners facing losing their homes.There’s a happy ending to this story. Betty Badro was notified this afternoon that her foreclosure has been postponed indefinitely.
******************************************************************************
So, this got me thinking....Where is Jamie Dimon, cause I would LOVE to speak with him. <3 you
Not so Breaking News: New Report Exposes JPMorgan Chase as a Mostly a Criminal Enterprise
Thursday, March 14, 2013
David Dayen: Out of Control – New Report Exposes JPMorgan Chase as Mostly a Criminal Enterprise
By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen
There’s been an unlikely yet welcome resurgence of chatter about breaking up the nation’s largest and most powerful banks. Bloomberg’s story quantifying the too big to fail subsidy grabbed some eyeballs (and there’s an upcoming GAO report on the subsidy that will do the same). Sherrod Brown announced an unlikely pairing with David Vitter working on legislation on the subject. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is going to give a big speech on Friday on breaking up the banks… at CPAC, the largest conservative political conference of the year.
At the same time the unending stream of reports of abuses and fraudulent actions give fuel to the movement. And we’ll get another one Friday, when Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations releases their report, complete with a companion hearing, on the London “Fail Whale” trades, the losses for which stretch as high as $8 billion. Early reports suggest that the report will be unsparing. Levin’s committee did an excellent job in prior investigations of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs (which they gift-wrapped to the Justice Department as a criminal referral, only to see DoJ toss it in the wastebasket). People I’ve talked to expect the hearing to be explosive.
As an excellent preview for the Friday fireworks, I urge you to read an astonishing new report, which I’ve embedded below, from analyst Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher and Co. The best way to describe the report, “JPM – Out of Control,” is that it reads like a rap sheet. Notably, Rosner takes mortgage abuses almost entirely out of the equation, and yet still manages to fill a 45-page report with documented case after documented case of serious fraud and abuse, most of which JPM has already admitted to (at least in the sense of reaching a settlement; given out captured regulatory structure the end result is invariably a settlement with the “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing” boilerplate appended). Rosner writes, “we could not find another ‘systemically important’ domestic bank that has recently been subject to as many public, non-mortgage related, regulatory actions or consent orders.”
Obviously this contrasts with Jamie Dimon’s spotless reputation (at least in Washington) and his bold talk of a “fortress balance sheet.” Yet as you read the report, it’s hard to see the bank as anything but a criminal racket just days away from imploding, were it not propped up by implicit bailout guarantees and light-touch regulators. Rosner paints a picture of a corporation saddled with pervasive internal control problems, which end up costing shareholders, and which “could materially impact profitability in the future.” He calculates that since 2009, JPM has paid out $8.5 billion in settlements for its outlaw activity, which equals nearly 12% of net income over the same period.
It’s hard to summarize all of the documented instances in this report of JPM has been breaking the law, but here’s my best shot. I try to keep up on these matters, and yet some of these I’m learning about for the first time:
Bank Secrecy Act violations;
Money laundering for drug cartels;
Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;
Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);
Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;
Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;
Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;
Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;
The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;
The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;
Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;
Illegal flood insurance commissions;
Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;
Auto-finance ripoffs;
Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;
Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;
Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);
Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;
“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;
Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;
Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;
Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).
And, exhale.
The sheer litany of illegal activities just overwhelms you. And these are only the ones where the company has entered into settlements or been sanctioned; it doesn’t even include ongoing investigations into things like Libor, illegally concealing inclusions of mortgage-backed securities in employer funds (another ERISA violation), the Fail Whale trades, and especially putback suits for mortgages, where a recent ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff has seriously increased exposure. While the risks are still very much alive and will continue to weigh on the firm, ultimately shareholders will pay, certainly not executives as long as the no-prosecutions standard holds.
Again, read the report, but two case studies stand out. First, JPM is trying to stick the public with losses related to its purchase of Washington Mutual and its related liabilities. Rosner documents painstakingly how JPM originally accepted the risks and responsibilities with the WaMu deal, and continued to do so for several years. But now that they see the actual possibility of mass mortgage-related putback claims, JPM wants to shift losses on over $190 billion in MBS onto the FDIC. They hope to get out from under as much as $5 billion in losses in this fashion. It’s impossible to logically follow JPM’s claim that they purchased WaMu but not any of its risk-related activities. The case “demonstrates the unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own management failures,” Rosner writes.
Finally, we have the Fail Whale trade, the subject of the Friday Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing. Rosner keys in on JPM’s internal “Task Force” report, which he compellingly characterizes as a complete whitewash. The Task Force was led by the heir apparent to the company, Michael Cavanagh (“like asking Joe Paterno to do the Penn State investigation instead of Louis Freeh,” in the words of former SEC chair Harvey Pitt). It limited the scope of the investigation to late 2011 and 2012, when now-public data clearly shows the problems at the Chief Investment Office going back years earlier, and fully known to senior management at the time. Rosner correctly brings up Sarbox Title III violations in conjunction with this, as top executives annually attested to the accuracy of financial statements now known to be untrue. The Task Force tried to exonerate Jamie Dimon by actually saying in a footnote that he was out of town for a period of time covered by the report.
And this footnote from the Task Force takes the cake:
Rosner has compiled an impressive dossier for any systemic risk regulator, if we had such things in more than name only in America. And I trust this will be a contribution to the ongoing debate – there really is one – over whether these mega-banks have become too big to manage, and too corrupt to continue.
There’s been an unlikely yet welcome resurgence of chatter about breaking up the nation’s largest and most powerful banks. Bloomberg’s story quantifying the too big to fail subsidy grabbed some eyeballs (and there’s an upcoming GAO report on the subsidy that will do the same). Sherrod Brown announced an unlikely pairing with David Vitter working on legislation on the subject. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is going to give a big speech on Friday on breaking up the banks… at CPAC, the largest conservative political conference of the year.
At the same time the unending stream of reports of abuses and fraudulent actions give fuel to the movement. And we’ll get another one Friday, when Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations releases their report, complete with a companion hearing, on the London “Fail Whale” trades, the losses for which stretch as high as $8 billion. Early reports suggest that the report will be unsparing. Levin’s committee did an excellent job in prior investigations of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs (which they gift-wrapped to the Justice Department as a criminal referral, only to see DoJ toss it in the wastebasket). People I’ve talked to expect the hearing to be explosive.
As an excellent preview for the Friday fireworks, I urge you to read an astonishing new report, which I’ve embedded below, from analyst Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher and Co. The best way to describe the report, “JPM – Out of Control,” is that it reads like a rap sheet. Notably, Rosner takes mortgage abuses almost entirely out of the equation, and yet still manages to fill a 45-page report with documented case after documented case of serious fraud and abuse, most of which JPM has already admitted to (at least in the sense of reaching a settlement; given out captured regulatory structure the end result is invariably a settlement with the “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing” boilerplate appended). Rosner writes, “we could not find another ‘systemically important’ domestic bank that has recently been subject to as many public, non-mortgage related, regulatory actions or consent orders.”
Obviously this contrasts with Jamie Dimon’s spotless reputation (at least in Washington) and his bold talk of a “fortress balance sheet.” Yet as you read the report, it’s hard to see the bank as anything but a criminal racket just days away from imploding, were it not propped up by implicit bailout guarantees and light-touch regulators. Rosner paints a picture of a corporation saddled with pervasive internal control problems, which end up costing shareholders, and which “could materially impact profitability in the future.” He calculates that since 2009, JPM has paid out $8.5 billion in settlements for its outlaw activity, which equals nearly 12% of net income over the same period.
It’s hard to summarize all of the documented instances in this report of JPM has been breaking the law, but here’s my best shot. I try to keep up on these matters, and yet some of these I’m learning about for the first time:
Bank Secrecy Act violations;
Money laundering for drug cartels;
Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;
Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);
Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;
Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;
Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;
Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;
The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;
The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;
Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;
Illegal flood insurance commissions;
Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;
Auto-finance ripoffs;
Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;
Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;
Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);
Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;
“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;
Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;
Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;
Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).
And, exhale.
The sheer litany of illegal activities just overwhelms you. And these are only the ones where the company has entered into settlements or been sanctioned; it doesn’t even include ongoing investigations into things like Libor, illegally concealing inclusions of mortgage-backed securities in employer funds (another ERISA violation), the Fail Whale trades, and especially putback suits for mortgages, where a recent ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff has seriously increased exposure. While the risks are still very much alive and will continue to weigh on the firm, ultimately shareholders will pay, certainly not executives as long as the no-prosecutions standard holds.
Again, read the report, but two case studies stand out. First, JPM is trying to stick the public with losses related to its purchase of Washington Mutual and its related liabilities. Rosner documents painstakingly how JPM originally accepted the risks and responsibilities with the WaMu deal, and continued to do so for several years. But now that they see the actual possibility of mass mortgage-related putback claims, JPM wants to shift losses on over $190 billion in MBS onto the FDIC. They hope to get out from under as much as $5 billion in losses in this fashion. It’s impossible to logically follow JPM’s claim that they purchased WaMu but not any of its risk-related activities. The case “demonstrates the unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own management failures,” Rosner writes.
Finally, we have the Fail Whale trade, the subject of the Friday Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing. Rosner keys in on JPM’s internal “Task Force” report, which he compellingly characterizes as a complete whitewash. The Task Force was led by the heir apparent to the company, Michael Cavanagh (“like asking Joe Paterno to do the Penn State investigation instead of Louis Freeh,” in the words of former SEC chair Harvey Pitt). It limited the scope of the investigation to late 2011 and 2012, when now-public data clearly shows the problems at the Chief Investment Office going back years earlier, and fully known to senior management at the time. Rosner correctly brings up Sarbox Title III violations in conjunction with this, as top executives annually attested to the accuracy of financial statements now known to be untrue. The Task Force tried to exonerate Jamie Dimon by actually saying in a footnote that he was out of town for a period of time covered by the report.
And this footnote from the Task Force takes the cake:
The description of “what happened” is not a technical analysis of the Synthetic Credit Portfolio or the price movements in the instruments held in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio. Instead, it focuses on the trading decision-making process and actions taken (or not taken) by various JPMorgan personnel. The description of activities described in this Report (including the trading strategies) is based in significant measure on the recollections of the traders (and in particular the trader who had day-to-day responsibility for the Synthetic Credit Portfolio and was the primary architect of the trades in question) and others. The Task Force has not been able to independently verify all of these recollections.Hey, who knows, don’t believe anything we’re saying, it’s not an investigation so much as an impressionistic collage.
Rosner has compiled an impressive dossier for any systemic risk regulator, if we had such things in more than name only in America. And I trust this will be a contribution to the ongoing debate – there really is one – over whether these mega-banks have become too big to manage, and too corrupt to continue.
****************************************************************************
So, when dealing with the brain damage of a JPMorgan Chase, what is a girl to do? I was debating on hanging from the rafters...but thought this might be a little more proactive....and healthier choice.
Lord knows dealing with them has toxified my life to an extent that I cannot put into words, the emotional duress is un real. So this was and is my answer:
http:/www.chasemenails.com and there is a "special" line inspired directly by this egregious, horrifying disaster that won't stop. "The Bank Collection"
PS Still LOVE you, even though you continue to lie to me. I will however not back down.
-Michelle
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Fraud, Robo-signing and Suicides. All in days work.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Mark Ames: Tracy Lawrence: The Foreclosure Suicide America Forgot
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.Cross posted from The eXiled
Before the 2008 crisis, the media paid little attention to the death toll taken on Americans by the decades-long class warfare waged against the 99%. Now they’re impossible to ignore. Stories like the US soldier in Iraq who committed suicide so that his wife could collect life insurance, and save their family home from foreclosure. Or the courtroom-suicide in Phoenix, in which a Yale-educated banker-swindler swallowed a cyanide capsule after being found guilty of setting his 10,000 sq foot McMansion on fire as a way of collecting insurance and evading mortgage payments he couldn’t afford.
Despite the somewhat increased media attention given to these tragic stories nowadays, there is one suicide directly tied to foreclosure fraud that has been completely ignored by the media. Her name was Tracy Lawrence, and for a brief moment last year, between the moment she turned whistleblower and her untimely and bizarre suicide, Tracy Lawrence’s testimony threatened to blow the entire fraud-closure criminal enterprise wide open, with repercussions that could have easily reverberated all the way up to the major banks and GSEs complicit in one of the greatest crimes this country has ever experienced.
In the months since Tracy Lawrence was found dead in her Las Vegas apartment at the age of 43, her story has only taken on more significance—even as her death has been forgotten. This is a story that demands our attention, a story we must not allow ourselves to forget.
First, some background to Tracy Lawrence’s suicide: On November 16, 2011, the attorney general for the state of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, announced a major first-of-its-kind 606-count criminal indictment against two Orange County, California-based title officers working for Lender Processing Services, the country’s largest mortgaging servicing company and the worst of the predatory “fraudclosure mills.”
Foreclosure fraud had been devastating America unabated for a few years, laying waste to untold hundreds of thousands of American families. The Nevada attorney general’s criminal case against the two LPS title officers—Gary Trafford and Geraldine Sheppard—represented, for a brief moment, the first time in years that American justice threatened the predatory lending class.
The next day, the Los Angeles Times reported on the scale of the fraud:
Just a few months after the Nevada AG’s 606-count criminal indictment against LPS, Missouri’s attorney general filed a 136-count criminal indictment against a unit of Lender Processing Services, called Docx, as the New York Times reported last February. That meant two major criminal cases.
Given the sheer scale of the crime committed—a plundering so brutal and devastating you’d only expect such a thing from a conquering barbarian horde—what amazes me is how underreported this crime still is, and how few Americans in the Establishment know any of the details, beyond perhaps the word “robo-signing.”
One of the rare exceptions was the excellent reporting done on my friend Dylan Ratigan’s Show, as well as the unforgettable 60 Minutes segment aired last year on foreclosure fraud and “robo-signing” mills. The 60 Minutes investigation focused on the fraud perpetrated by Lender Processing Services unit, Docx, which used blatantly fraudulent “robo-signing” foreclosure documents to dispossess Americans of their homes on behalf of the Wall Street banks. Like the way peasants in a banana republic are treated, hundreds of thousands—if not millions— of Americans have been illegally and fraudulently evicted from their homes. And all the while as it happened, the Obama Administration stood by and wrung its hands—and that’s the kind, whitewashed way of putting it. Another way of looking at what the Obama Administration did with the mass foreclosure fraud crime—the true and honest way of putting it—is that the White House actively provided political and legal cover for one of the largest crimes perpetrated against Americans in modern history. Sorry, but that’s the truth—and the sad thing is, as horrible as the Obama Administration has been on housing, a President Romney will almost certainly find a way to be even worse, even if that worseness has to be invented. That’s one of the lessons we’ve all had to learn these past few decades.
Among the worst of the foreclosure servicers abusing the fraudulent “Linda Green” signature was Docx, the unit of Lender Processing Services which has since been shuttered.
60 Minutes tracked down the real “Linda Green” whose name was fraudulently abused to destroy the lives of countless Americans, and it’s worth quoting what 60 Minutes found:
In return for turning state’s witness, Tracy Lawrence plea bargained her charges down to a single misdemeanor charge of falsely notarizing a signature, which carries, in the worst case scenario, a maximum of one year in prison and a $2,000 fine. However, her testimony could put her two LPS superiors behind bars for decades—which is why many believed Nevada’s goal was to turn those two LPS officers into state’s witnesses against LPS’s senior executives.
On November 29, 2011—just two weeks after the Nevada attorney general announced the landmark criminal case—whistleblower Tracy Lawrence was supposed to appear before a judge for her sentencing. It should have been a routine appearance, but she didn’t show up. Her lawyer grew anxious, called police to check on Tracy Lawrence’s home, and that’s when they found her dead.
The timing of her death was suspicious, to say the least. Immediately, before any investigation had been conducted, Las Vegas police officially “ruled out homicide” as her cause of death.
Tracy Lawrence’s suicide was given scant coverage in the national media. Here is one of the few national media stories about her death, a short piece on MSNBC’s website:
Though there has been little public discussion about Tracy Lawrence’s suicide, in private forums, her death sent a chill. Although there have been reports that Lawrence was depressed and stressed from her role as the key whistleblower, no one I know who reports on the housing disaster unquestioningly accepts the official version, that Tracy Lawrence’s suicide timing just happened to come at the most convenient time imaginable.
The stakes could not have been higher: As MSNBC reported, Las Vegas police said that her testimony threatened to “throw into question the legality of most Las Vegas home foreclosures in the past few years.”
As one commenter darkly quipped on the site 4closurefraud.org:
It took over two decades for authorities to overturn the “suicide” verdict and state the obvious: In 2003, Italian authorities ruled Roberto Calvi’s death a murder.
In the meantime, the fallout from Tracy Lawrence’s suicide has been worse than predictable: In Nevada, the case against Lender Processing Services appears to have all but fallen apart. With the Obama Administration foisting its foreclosure fraud settlement on all the states in January—a deal that left bankers happy, and everyone else screwed— and the key witness to the LPS case dead, the writing was on the wall.
Masto essentially fired her deputy AG, John Kelleher, who headed up the once-aggressive Nevada mortgage Fraud Task Force. With Kelleher gone, the Task Force looks like its work is all but over, as reported in local Las Vegas Channel 8 News:
Along with Kelleher, several other Nevada prosecutors and investigators have since been reassigned or transferred out to pasture. In the courts, a Nevada judge all but gutted the AG’s criminal case against Lender Processing Servicers.
Over in Missouri, the state’s criminal case was recently quietly settled for a paltry sum, and forgotten about.
Meanwhile in LPS’s headquarter state of Florida, the attorney general Pam Bondi has done everything to protect LPS, even firing two of her office’s attorneys who made the mistake of investigating LPS fraud.
All we can for now—while this country is still controlled by a rank oligarchy— is remember Tracy Lawrence’s suicide, so that some day we can learn what drove this hero to her terrifying early grave.
This article was first published in the Daily Banter
Every week, it seems there’s another tragic story about a suicide or murder-suicides linked to foreclosure trauma. Some of the more spectacular murder-by-foreclosure stories the past few years have been collected by a blog called “Greenspan’s Body Count”—others, myself included,
have been writing about these terrible stories of class warfare being
waged by the only side fighting it, and winning it, as Warren Buffett
rightly said.Before the 2008 crisis, the media paid little attention to the death toll taken on Americans by the decades-long class warfare waged against the 99%. Now they’re impossible to ignore. Stories like the US soldier in Iraq who committed suicide so that his wife could collect life insurance, and save their family home from foreclosure. Or the courtroom-suicide in Phoenix, in which a Yale-educated banker-swindler swallowed a cyanide capsule after being found guilty of setting his 10,000 sq foot McMansion on fire as a way of collecting insurance and evading mortgage payments he couldn’t afford.
Despite the somewhat increased media attention given to these tragic stories nowadays, there is one suicide directly tied to foreclosure fraud that has been completely ignored by the media. Her name was Tracy Lawrence, and for a brief moment last year, between the moment she turned whistleblower and her untimely and bizarre suicide, Tracy Lawrence’s testimony threatened to blow the entire fraud-closure criminal enterprise wide open, with repercussions that could have easily reverberated all the way up to the major banks and GSEs complicit in one of the greatest crimes this country has ever experienced.
In the months since Tracy Lawrence was found dead in her Las Vegas apartment at the age of 43, her story has only taken on more significance—even as her death has been forgotten. This is a story that demands our attention, a story we must not allow ourselves to forget.
First, some background to Tracy Lawrence’s suicide: On November 16, 2011, the attorney general for the state of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, announced a major first-of-its-kind 606-count criminal indictment against two Orange County, California-based title officers working for Lender Processing Services, the country’s largest mortgaging servicing company and the worst of the predatory “fraudclosure mills.”
Foreclosure fraud had been devastating America unabated for a few years, laying waste to untold hundreds of thousands of American families. The Nevada attorney general’s criminal case against the two LPS title officers—Gary Trafford and Geraldine Sheppard—represented, for a brief moment, the first time in years that American justice threatened the predatory lending class.
What happened to the bombshell indictment of these LPS supervisors?
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism was among the first to report the Nevada AG’s indictments, rightly pointing out the significance of going after mid-level officers in the foreclosure mill firm as a way of launching a full-scale takedown:“[A]s mob prosecutions have shown again and again, you start by going after the foot soldiers in the hope that they roll people higher up on the food chain. And at a minimum, this action says that the law and due process matter, and violations, particularly large scale, systematic violations, can and will be punished.”This marked the first time that bigtime bank fraudsters faced serious jail time—Attorney General Masto’s criminal case sent shockwaves throughout the mortgage lending world. More importantly, her criminal case threatened to finally change the way America deals with the bankster class that has been plundering with impunity for years. Politically, Nevada’s criminal indictment could have enormous repercussions; economically, the case could lead to invalidating tens upon tens of thousands of fraudulent foreclosures conducted in the Las Vegas area over the past few years.
The next day, the Los Angeles Times reported on the scale of the fraud:
In what appear to be the first criminal charges to stem from the fracas over improper foreclosures last year, two Southern California title loan officers have been indicted by a Nevada grand jury for allegedly filing tens of thousands of improper documents related to Las Vegas-area foreclosures.
The Clark County grand jury charged Gary Trafford, 49, of Irvine and Geraldine Sheppard, 62, of Santa Ana on 606 counts, alleging that the two headed up a vast “robo-signing” operation that resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent foreclosure documents.
The documents were filed with the Clark County recorder’s office between 2005 and 2008, according to the indictment. The two title loan officers worked for the firm Lender Processing Services, a foreclosure processing company based in Florida that has been used by most of the largest banks in the nation to process home repossessions.”
Just a few months after the Nevada AG’s 606-count criminal indictment against LPS, Missouri’s attorney general filed a 136-count criminal indictment against a unit of Lender Processing Services, called Docx, as the New York Times reported last February. That meant two major criminal cases.
Given the sheer scale of the crime committed—a plundering so brutal and devastating you’d only expect such a thing from a conquering barbarian horde—what amazes me is how underreported this crime still is, and how few Americans in the Establishment know any of the details, beyond perhaps the word “robo-signing.”
One of the rare exceptions was the excellent reporting done on my friend Dylan Ratigan’s Show, as well as the unforgettable 60 Minutes segment aired last year on foreclosure fraud and “robo-signing” mills. The 60 Minutes investigation focused on the fraud perpetrated by Lender Processing Services unit, Docx, which used blatantly fraudulent “robo-signing” foreclosure documents to dispossess Americans of their homes on behalf of the Wall Street banks. Like the way peasants in a banana republic are treated, hundreds of thousands—if not millions— of Americans have been illegally and fraudulently evicted from their homes. And all the while as it happened, the Obama Administration stood by and wrung its hands—and that’s the kind, whitewashed way of putting it. Another way of looking at what the Obama Administration did with the mass foreclosure fraud crime—the true and honest way of putting it—is that the White House actively provided political and legal cover for one of the largest crimes perpetrated against Americans in modern history. Sorry, but that’s the truth—and the sad thing is, as horrible as the Obama Administration has been on housing, a President Romney will almost certainly find a way to be even worse, even if that worseness has to be invented. That’s one of the lessons we’ve all had to learn these past few decades.
“Obama Lied, Hope Died” should be the slogan
The 60 Minutes segment zeroed in on what is now the most
infamous fraudulent-signature of our time: The infamous “Linda
Green”—whose signature appeared on an impossibly large number of foreclosure documents. A single fake “Linda Green” was officially listed as a “vice president” at some 20 different foreclosure mills, this same “Linda Green” signing untold thousands of fraudulent documents evicting Americans from their homes.Among the worst of the foreclosure servicers abusing the fraudulent “Linda Green” signature was Docx, the unit of Lender Processing Services which has since been shuttered.
60 Minutes tracked down the real “Linda Green” whose name was fraudulently abused to destroy the lives of countless Americans, and it’s worth quoting what 60 Minutes found:
We went searching for “the” Linda Green and found her in rural Georgia. She told us she has never been a bank vice president.So you have now a sense of just how vast the foreclosure fraud crime was, and how it involved not only the largest mortgage servicer in the nation, LPS, but also all the major banks that used LPS’s services to throw Americans out of their homes illegally and take possession of them.
In 2003, she was a shipping clerk for auto parts when her grandson told her about a job at a company called Docx. The company, that was once housed in Alpharetta, Ga., was a sweatshop for forged mortgage documents.
Docx, and companies like it, were recreating missing mortgage assignments for the banks and providing the legally required signatures of bank vice presidents and notaries. Linda Green says she was named a bank vice president by Docx because her name was short and easy to spell. As demand exploded, Docx needed more Linda Greens.
“So you’re Linda Green?” Pelley asked Chris Pendley.
“Yeah, can’t you tell?” Pendley, who is a man, replied.
Pendley worked at Docx at the same time and signed as Linda Green.
No fraud here folks, looks like 1 authentic “Linda Green” to us!
Let’s rewind again to last November 16, 2011, the day that Nevada’s
attorney general Masto announced her indictment against the two LPS
title officers—two weeks before Tracy Lawrence took her life. Nevada’s
case against LPS rested primarily on the testimony of a whistleblower,
Tracy Lawrence, who worked in Lender Processing Services’ office in Las
Vegas. Her testimony threatened to unravel tens of thousands of
fraudulent foreclosures in the state of Nevada between the years
2005-2008, and the criminal activities of the entire mortgage servicing
industry. Nevada has suffered the worst foreclosure problem of any state
in the union.In return for turning state’s witness, Tracy Lawrence plea bargained her charges down to a single misdemeanor charge of falsely notarizing a signature, which carries, in the worst case scenario, a maximum of one year in prison and a $2,000 fine. However, her testimony could put her two LPS superiors behind bars for decades—which is why many believed Nevada’s goal was to turn those two LPS officers into state’s witnesses against LPS’s senior executives.
On November 29, 2011—just two weeks after the Nevada attorney general announced the landmark criminal case—whistleblower Tracy Lawrence was supposed to appear before a judge for her sentencing. It should have been a routine appearance, but she didn’t show up. Her lawyer grew anxious, called police to check on Tracy Lawrence’s home, and that’s when they found her dead.
The timing of her death was suspicious, to say the least. Immediately, before any investigation had been conducted, Las Vegas police officially “ruled out homicide” as her cause of death.
Tracy Lawrence’s suicide was given scant coverage in the national media. Here is one of the few national media stories about her death, a short piece on MSNBC’s website:
Foreclosure fraud whistleblower found deadI recently called the Clark County coroner’s office to find out if they had determined her official cause of death. A spokesperson told me that Tracy died from “intoxication” of a combination of Xanax (Alprazolam) and two antihistamines: Benadryl (Diphenhydramine) and Hydroxyzine. Officially, her death was ruled a suicide.
By msnbc.com staff
A notary public who signed tens of thousands of false documents in a massive foreclosure scam before blowing the whistle on the scandal has been found dead in her Las Vegas home.
NBC station KSNV of Las Vegas reported that the woman, Tracy Lawrence, 43, was scheduled to be sentenced Monday morning after she pleaded guilty this month to notarizing the signature of an individual not in her presence. She failed to show up for her hearing, and police found her body at her home later in the day.
It could not immediately be determined whether Lawrence, who faced up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000, died of suicide or of natural causes, KSNV reported. Detectives said they had ruled out homicide. [So quickly! And we thought only Russian police solved "crimeless" death scenes within minutes of arriving!—M.A.]
Lawrence came forward earlier this month and blew the whistle on the operation, in which title officers Gary Trafford, 49, of Irvine, Calif., and Geraldine Sheppard, 62, of Santa Ana, Calif. — who worked for a Florida processing company used by most major banks to process repossessions — allegedly forged signatures on tens of thousands of default notices from 2005 to 2008.
Police said at the time that the alleged scam had thrown into question the legality of most Las Vegas home foreclosures in the past few years, leaving many people living in foreclosed-upon homes that they unknowingly don’t actually own. [Good thing there's no motive to make a detective suspicious here or anything!—M.A.]
Though there has been little public discussion about Tracy Lawrence’s suicide, in private forums, her death sent a chill. Although there have been reports that Lawrence was depressed and stressed from her role as the key whistleblower, no one I know who reports on the housing disaster unquestioningly accepts the official version, that Tracy Lawrence’s suicide timing just happened to come at the most convenient time imaginable.
The stakes could not have been higher: As MSNBC reported, Las Vegas police said that her testimony threatened to “throw into question the legality of most Las Vegas home foreclosures in the past few years.”
As one commenter darkly quipped on the site 4closurefraud.org:
I bet Linda Green signs the coroners report….One only has to remember that Las Vegas’ gambling industry was created by mobsters like Meyer Lansky—who is also credited with helping invent modern offshore banking in the early 1930s in Switzerland. In this world, deaths ruled “suicides” are not unheard of. One of the most spectacular examples involved the “suicide” of Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, who in 1982 was found hanging from London’s Blackfriars Bridge with bricks stuffed into his pockets along with $15,000 cash. The day before Calvi’s “suicide” his secretary “jumped” out of the bank headquarter’s fourth floor window and died—her death was also ruled suicide.
But seriously,
Now people can’t question the validity of the documents she attested to authentic because she is dead.
When they are alive you can challenge the presumption of authenticity. It’s nearly impossible to succeed if you can’t get the notary on the stand and cross examine them. Now there are 25000 properties that are pretty much a lock to be legitimized.
It took over two decades for authorities to overturn the “suicide” verdict and state the obvious: In 2003, Italian authorities ruled Roberto Calvi’s death a murder.
In the meantime, the fallout from Tracy Lawrence’s suicide has been worse than predictable: In Nevada, the case against Lender Processing Services appears to have all but fallen apart. With the Obama Administration foisting its foreclosure fraud settlement on all the states in January—a deal that left bankers happy, and everyone else screwed— and the key witness to the LPS case dead, the writing was on the wall.
Masto essentially fired her deputy AG, John Kelleher, who headed up the once-aggressive Nevada mortgage Fraud Task Force. With Kelleher gone, the Task Force looks like its work is all but over, as reported in local Las Vegas Channel 8 News:
“Nevada’s mortgage Fraud Task Force — arguably among the most aggressive in the country — has undergone some dramatic changes in the last few months. The changes prompted its former chief to question whether those responsible for Nevada’s housing collapse will ever be brought to justice.”In the report, Kelleher told Channel 8: “It’s my personal opinion that there was some kind of deal cut, involving signing the multi-state (agreement) for whatever reason: financial, political, you can speculate all day long and back off criminal.”
Along with Kelleher, several other Nevada prosecutors and investigators have since been reassigned or transferred out to pasture. In the courts, a Nevada judge all but gutted the AG’s criminal case against Lender Processing Servicers.
Over in Missouri, the state’s criminal case was recently quietly settled for a paltry sum, and forgotten about.
Meanwhile in LPS’s headquarter state of Florida, the attorney general Pam Bondi has done everything to protect LPS, even firing two of her office’s attorneys who made the mistake of investigating LPS fraud.
Hugh Harris, CEO of Lender Processing Services, recently named “One of the Best Places To Work In Northeast Florida”
In a recent celebratory conference call
that Lender Processing Servicers held with financial analysts, Hugh
Harris, the CEO of Lender Processing, could barely contain himself as he
gloated to analysts from Barcalys, Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions:“First, let me just say we are very pleased to report strong second-quarter operating performance…we’ve gained greater clarity over the potential resolution of legal and regulatory issues related to the past practices.So Tracy Lawrence’s highly suspect suicide is another major victory for the bankster class, and another giant loss for the rest of us. No matter what the circumstances of her suicide—that is, even if she was driven to kill herself in despair, after turning whistleblower and facing the pressure of confronting one of the biggest criminal fraud scams in history—that doesn’t make her death any less significant, or infuriating, or disturbing. Either way, the criminal lending industry drove a lone and lonely hero to her death.
“First, we announced yesterday, we’ve settled all our legal issues with the Missouri Attorney General’s office. This settlement includes a dismissal of all criminal charges filed against DocX. Second, an motion to dismiss in the Nevada Attorney General’s case was granted in part which resulted in the scope of the suit being significantly narrowed.”
All we can for now—while this country is still controlled by a rank oligarchy— is remember Tracy Lawrence’s suicide, so that some day we can learn what drove this hero to her terrifying early grave.
Death by Foreclosure. RIP Larry Delassus. Shameful.
Disabled Navy Veteran Died in Court Fighting Foreclosure
Posted March 13th, 2013 by US Navy SEALs
Such was the case of a 62-year-old disabled Navy veteran who fought against Wells Fargo to get his home back.Larry Delassus, of Hermosa Beach, CA., succumbed to a heart attack on December 19, 2012 while attending a preliminary hearing in Torrance Courthouse.
Delassus, who was in a wheelchair, was suffering from a rare disease called Budd-Chiari syndrome. According to his deposition, he served in the U.S. Navy from 1969 to 1973 and handled jet fuel, and later worked as a production assistant in independent films and for U.S. Airways at LAX International Airport.
In 1996, Delassus bought his 1-bedroom condo unit at 320 Hermosa Avenue. The problem began when his March 2009 payment of $1,237 wasn’t processed as he expected, Easy Reader reports. Even though the late Navy veteran paid his mortgage two months in advance since 2007, the bank later informed him that his payment wasn’t sufficient, and he was suddenly behind on his mortgage payments.
However, Delassus’ friend and lawyer, Anthony Trujillo of Redondo Beach, discovered that the banked used an incorrect assessor’s parcel number that corresponded to Delassus’ neighbor’s home. Turns out, it was Delassus’ neighbor who’s behind on his property taxes.
Trujillo informed Wells Fargo of the mistake, which was acknowledged by the company. However, the judge presiding over the hearing sided with the company.
“He was sure that when a judge heard that he was never even late on a payment, that [the judge] would do something,” said Debbie Popovich, a friend who arrived in court with Delassus.
In a statement issued by Wells Fargo after Delassus’ death, it said: “Mr. Delassus’ passing was a tragic event and our deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends. In a tentative ruling posted on the court’s Web site the night before the scheduled hearing, the judge indicated she was prepared to dismiss all the claims put forward by Mr. Delassus’ attorneys and rule in favor of our motion for summary judgment. Given that there was no testimony or evidence to be presented at the hearing, there was no reason for Mr. Delassus to attend and it is truly unfortunate that he was brought there.”
Trujillo, however, maintained that Delassus was at the court to testify.
Judge Ellison was expected to have had made a decision by Jan. 17 whether the case will go to trial.
Foreclosure Officially Withdrawn by JPMC. Michelle Hansen of Aurora Colorado. Message Stays Up.
So, what's next? Well, I was asked to fax over all the documentation that the Executive Office didn't have, but I have actually seen it in their system...they have had it officially for 8 months, but I sent it again with the original time stamped faxes for the past two years, just to be sure that they have just about everything that I have.
So....I have a doctor's appointment for this heart situation...and the ringing in my ears, no doubt the long term consequences of long term chronic stress. Thanks a lot Chase.
The damage has been done. Probably a little more pro-active then hanging myself with their bureaucratic red tape from my rafters.
So, yes I'm still in limbo...it has been over two years, and I keep getting a lot of apologies....a LOT of apologies for how I've been treated, and they can't imagine how I have felt over the past two years and everything I have gone through.
Message is still up. I won't take it down until we have met a resolution to this situation that is FAIR.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
RIP Joe Tummons. Suicide Caused By Foreclosure.
Thursday March 7, 2013
UPDATE: Businessman facing home foreclosure commits suicide
File photo
Joe
Tummons, 63, fatally shot himself Thursday as officials arrived to
evict him from his home. Tummons, who was facing foreclosure, was the
owner of Joe's Mart in St. Albans.
Police say Joe Tummons, 63, shot himself with a handgun after process servers told him he needed to leave his home.
Tummons was the owner of the Joe's Mart convenience store in St. Albans.
St. Albans Police Department Capt. James Agee said process servers with the Kanawha County Sheriff's Department arrived at Tummons' home on the 2800 block of Lincoln Avenue around 10 a.m. Thursday to serve eviction papers.
Agee said Tummons had been facing financial difficulties of late and was aware that officials were moving forward with foreclosure proceedings on his property.
"He knew it was coming," Agee said. "They had talked with him since mid- to late February."
Agee said the process servers met Tummons at his door, asked him to gather his things and then waited outside his home. He said Tummons did not seem resistant to the officers' requests.
"About 20 or 30 minutes went by and they checked back and asked him how it was going," Agee said. "He said, 'OK, give me a minute,' and then a few minutes later they heard the shot."
Tummons moved to St. Albans from Pennsylvania several decades ago. He did not have any family in the area.
Deputies worked all Thursday to find one of Tummons' relatives to inform them of the incident. Agee said police finally got in touch with Tummons' sister in Texas
*******************************************************************************
Anyone else as pissed off as I am? We are treated like absolute nothings.... not human. Yeah, well my answer is really simple....
http://www.chasemenails.com/ I'm a woman in Aurora Colorado that isn't backing down.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards Fired WhistleBlowers. Fired for Political Reasons.
June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards Were Fired After Revealing Widespread Foreclosure Fraud
June Clarkson went to Ernie's Bar-B-Q in Fort Lauderdale to have lunch with her supervisor, Bob Julian; and some coworkers. It was a Friday in May 2011, the end of a hectic workweek at the local economic crimes unit of the Office of the Attorney General.
Clarkson, a small, lively woman with glasses and blond hair, had left
a private law firm to accept the sub-$60,000-a-year job. She relished
the idea of being a public watchdog, of digging into the records of
companies to catch them trying to cheat customers.
"It was just right up my alley: people defrauding other people, companies defrauding the public. I thought it was the best thing that had ever fallen into my lap," Clarkson recalls.
She worked closely with colleague Theresa Edwards. Their typical assignments involved consumer fraud, but in 2010, they started getting calls from hard-up homeowners. Millions of families had faced foreclosure in the wake of the housing collapse; most had capitulated under the power of giant banks and simply surrendered their homes. But more and more, Clarkson was hearing from individuals who were fighting back.
These homeowners noticed mistakes in the documents that the banks were using as the basis to seize people's homes: strange signatures, missing information, notary seals with no signature, dates in the future. Skeptics began wondering whether these were in fact not innocent mistakes but symptoms of intentional and possibly systemic fraud. Clarkson and Edwards were some of the first public officials willing to listen to these accusations.
Clarkson noticed Julian's phone ringing during lunch but didn't pay much attention. They drove back to the downtown Fort Lauderdale office building they shared with several of the area's most powerful law firms.
Clarkson returned to her desk, reading through piles of documents. Recently she had been investigating Lender Processing Services (LPS), a company that, by some estimates, helped prepare paperwork for half the foreclosures in the country. Every time she found a red flag — a suspect signature, perhaps, or an intriguing memo — she went next door to Julian's office and showed him. But since lunch, he hadn't been acting normally, she thought. Clarkson came back a couple of times, and each time she announced a discovery, it seemed to pain Julian. Eventually he closed his door, but Clarkson knocked again. Julian just looked up at her. She thought he might be sick. "What's the matter?" she asked. "I'm doing a good job!"
"I know," she remembers him saying. She left and closed the door.
Edwards came back from a morning of depositions and stopped by Julian's office. She was tall and calm-voiced with reddish-brown hair, more experienced at the AG's office than Clarkson.
"Get June and come in here," he told her.
He cut straight to the chase: "You're both done at the end of the day. It's a done deal, all the way up to Tallahassee. You can either quit or be terminated," they remembered him saying.
Clarkson and Edwards left the office, stunned. Edwards had known Julian since law school, and the three of them had worked closely together. The two investigators considered themselves the hardest-working people in the office and had recently received a commendation for their work. Julian had encouraged them to go after the foreclosure-fraud cases with all they had, and they even helped win a $2 million settlement with the foreclosure law firm of Marshall Watson, which had been accused of fudging its documents. So what happened?
The women say that, at the time, they had no idea. But over the past year, as supporters have rallied to their side, they've started to believe they were ousted for political reasons. Going after powerful law firms and banks didn't sit too well with the state's new, business-friendly Republican administration, including Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Since their ouster, the women have moved on to private practice and become heroes to some, though their power in court is a shadow of their former influence. Meanwhile, the mortgage industry has not exactly gotten its papers in order.
The complicated system of investments that underlies the industry — mortgage-backed securities, government-sponsored enterprises — may seem distant and fanciful to buyers when they sign on the dotted line and buy into the American dream of home ownership. But the demanding letters that can suddenly show up in the mail — pay now or lose your home — are undeniably real. What if the documentation to back up the bank's claim to your house were missing or incomplete, if the bank was deriving its power from a few pieces of paper slapped together at a document mill? How would you know?
One Saturday afternoon in May 2010, Clarkson was manning the attorney general's table at a mortgage-fraud seminar at Florida International University in Miami. Much of the discussion was about two-bit scams, like companies offering too-good-to-be-true loan modifications. A woman came up to the table. "I've been trying to get in touch with you," said Lisa Epstein, a sharp-eyed brunet in her 40s.
Epstein, a registered nurse, was going through a divorce and had started to worry about money. She asked her lender, Chase Bank, to help work out a solution that would lower her monthly payments. "I had excellent credit and had never paid a bill late," she says. That inquiry led to two surprises: First, Chase told her that another bank, Wells Fargo, was involved and would not allow any sort of loan modification. Second, after weeks of persistence, Chase suggested that no modification would ever happen unless she stopped paying her mortgage for three months.
After getting booted from the Attorney General's
Office a year ago, June Clarkson (left) and Theresa Edwards started a
private law partnership in Fort Lauderdale.
Lisa Epstein was one of the first people to bring
faulty documents to Clarkson and Edwards and is currently running for
Palm Beach clerk of courts.
"It was just right up my alley: people defrauding other people, companies defrauding the public. I thought it was the best thing that had ever fallen into my lap," Clarkson recalls.
She worked closely with colleague Theresa Edwards. Their typical assignments involved consumer fraud, but in 2010, they started getting calls from hard-up homeowners. Millions of families had faced foreclosure in the wake of the housing collapse; most had capitulated under the power of giant banks and simply surrendered their homes. But more and more, Clarkson was hearing from individuals who were fighting back.
These homeowners noticed mistakes in the documents that the banks were using as the basis to seize people's homes: strange signatures, missing information, notary seals with no signature, dates in the future. Skeptics began wondering whether these were in fact not innocent mistakes but symptoms of intentional and possibly systemic fraud. Clarkson and Edwards were some of the first public officials willing to listen to these accusations.
Clarkson noticed Julian's phone ringing during lunch but didn't pay much attention. They drove back to the downtown Fort Lauderdale office building they shared with several of the area's most powerful law firms.
Clarkson returned to her desk, reading through piles of documents. Recently she had been investigating Lender Processing Services (LPS), a company that, by some estimates, helped prepare paperwork for half the foreclosures in the country. Every time she found a red flag — a suspect signature, perhaps, or an intriguing memo — she went next door to Julian's office and showed him. But since lunch, he hadn't been acting normally, she thought. Clarkson came back a couple of times, and each time she announced a discovery, it seemed to pain Julian. Eventually he closed his door, but Clarkson knocked again. Julian just looked up at her. She thought he might be sick. "What's the matter?" she asked. "I'm doing a good job!"
"I know," she remembers him saying. She left and closed the door.
Edwards came back from a morning of depositions and stopped by Julian's office. She was tall and calm-voiced with reddish-brown hair, more experienced at the AG's office than Clarkson.
"Get June and come in here," he told her.
He cut straight to the chase: "You're both done at the end of the day. It's a done deal, all the way up to Tallahassee. You can either quit or be terminated," they remembered him saying.
Clarkson and Edwards left the office, stunned. Edwards had known Julian since law school, and the three of them had worked closely together. The two investigators considered themselves the hardest-working people in the office and had recently received a commendation for their work. Julian had encouraged them to go after the foreclosure-fraud cases with all they had, and they even helped win a $2 million settlement with the foreclosure law firm of Marshall Watson, which had been accused of fudging its documents. So what happened?
The women say that, at the time, they had no idea. But over the past year, as supporters have rallied to their side, they've started to believe they were ousted for political reasons. Going after powerful law firms and banks didn't sit too well with the state's new, business-friendly Republican administration, including Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Since their ouster, the women have moved on to private practice and become heroes to some, though their power in court is a shadow of their former influence. Meanwhile, the mortgage industry has not exactly gotten its papers in order.
The complicated system of investments that underlies the industry — mortgage-backed securities, government-sponsored enterprises — may seem distant and fanciful to buyers when they sign on the dotted line and buy into the American dream of home ownership. But the demanding letters that can suddenly show up in the mail — pay now or lose your home — are undeniably real. What if the documentation to back up the bank's claim to your house were missing or incomplete, if the bank was deriving its power from a few pieces of paper slapped together at a document mill? How would you know?
One Saturday afternoon in May 2010, Clarkson was manning the attorney general's table at a mortgage-fraud seminar at Florida International University in Miami. Much of the discussion was about two-bit scams, like companies offering too-good-to-be-true loan modifications. A woman came up to the table. "I've been trying to get in touch with you," said Lisa Epstein, a sharp-eyed brunet in her 40s.
Epstein, a registered nurse, was going through a divorce and had started to worry about money. She asked her lender, Chase Bank, to help work out a solution that would lower her monthly payments. "I had excellent credit and had never paid a bill late," she says. That inquiry led to two surprises: First, Chase told her that another bank, Wells Fargo, was involved and would not allow any sort of loan modification. Second, after weeks of persistence, Chase suggested that no modification would ever happen unless she stopped paying her mortgage for three months.
Epstein was aghast at losing her pristine credit score, but she
complied and stopped paying. After 90 days, she heard nothing. Around
day 117 or so, by her count, she got a knock on the door and was served
with foreclosure papers. Epstein was confused when she examined the
documents and saw that the company attempting to seize her home was not
Chase or Wells Fargo but U.S. Bank.
Epstein began spending her days off at the courthouse, sitting in on foreclosure-court proceedings to acquaint herself with the baffling intricacies of the system. She also looked up other people's documents in the public record. She noticed a pattern in documents that, like hers, had been signed by two women with the same last name: Erin and Lisa Cullaro. In many instances, both the signature and notary lines had the same handwriting; it seemed like one or the other would just sign both of the names. After a little digging, she learned that they were sisters-in-law who both worked at a law firm called Florida Default Law Group in Tampa.
Epstein brought her documents when she finally met with Clarkson and
Edwards in the conference room at their downtown office. Epstein slid a
piece of paper across the table. Clarkson and Edwards realized, to their
horror, that one of the signers, Erin Cullaro, was a colleague of theirs — a fellow fraud investigator at the attorney general's Tampa office.
Clarkson and Edwards had no choice but to report the discovery to Julian, who dutifully sent the news up the line. A resulting investigation revealed that Cullaro had been moonlighting as a document signer for the law firm without telling anyone at her government job. Cullaro was reprimanded and later dismissed from the Attorney General's Office.
"It wasn't fun" turning in a coworker, Clarkson recalls. "It was one of the most horrible experiences I've ever had to go through, besides being fired."
But amid this tempest, Clarkson and Edwards were discovering more and more suspicious documents. With the blessing of Julian and a hunch that something strange was going on, Clarkson and Edwards dug into the ever-deepening piles of papers on their desks.
Before she went on 60 Minutes with revelations of paste-up documents, before she sued her bank, and before she won that suit with an $18 million payout, Lynn Szymoniak could easily have been mistaken for an obsessive nutjob. The living room of her Palm Beach Gardens house contained a wall of binders filled with copies of other people's court records. She burned out one copy machine, and a neighbor donated another. She showed up to meetings with fellow foreclosure activists carrying reams of paper and giant, blown-up copies of documents with obvious mistakes.
If Epstein played the role of the naive newcomer who was surprised at the mistakes she was finding, Szymoniak was the wonkish cynic who figured there must be more. A lawyer with experience investigating white-collar crimes, she had bought a home in 1998 and successfully refinanced in 2006. She says that in early 2008, her bank had raised her interest rate in a technical violation of the terms of her mortgage agreement, so she stopped paying until it could be sorted out. The bank sued for foreclosure that July.
She looked at the assignment of mortgage — a document that proves which bank owns a mortgage, much like a title proves who owns a car — that the bank was using as a basis to seize her home. It was dated September 2008: two months into the future.
Szymoniak asked for more documentation. At first, the servicing company that handled the foreclosure told her it couldn't find the promissory note — an essential document that she signed when she bought the house. By signing a promissory note, the homeowner promises to pay back the bank for a loan to buy a house. Szymoniak says she never received a copy of the promissory note when she initially bought her house.
"A year and a half after my foreclosure was started, they said, 'Eureka! We found the note!' " Szymoniak recalls. She says she was given copies of it, along with two different versions of the "allonge," a page on which the bank endorsed it with an official stamp.
"One of them had a filing strip across the top with a book and page number" indicating where the original version was filed in the courthouse. Ever the skeptic, Szymoniak says she "trooped on down to the courthouse to find what was actually at that book and page number." A clerk helped her pull up the digital file, and Szymoniak was shocked. In the specified place was a different document altogether — although the header and footer matched the copy of the note that the bank had provided.
"Somebody had cut the top strip off my mortgage and the bottom strip and pasted it to the allonge [and then gave me a photocopy]. If you held it up and put it on tracing paper and interposed it, you could tell it was the exact thing."
The bank later blamed a broken copier, but Szymoniak is more blunt: "Documents were being fabricated."
Epstein began spending her days off at the courthouse, sitting in on foreclosure-court proceedings to acquaint herself with the baffling intricacies of the system. She also looked up other people's documents in the public record. She noticed a pattern in documents that, like hers, had been signed by two women with the same last name: Erin and Lisa Cullaro. In many instances, both the signature and notary lines had the same handwriting; it seemed like one or the other would just sign both of the names. After a little digging, she learned that they were sisters-in-law who both worked at a law firm called Florida Default Law Group in Tampa.
Lynn Szymoniak looked into her own foreclosure and
found suspicious documents. She recently won $18 million in a lawsuit
with the U.S. government against several banks.
Clarkson and Edwards had no choice but to report the discovery to Julian, who dutifully sent the news up the line. A resulting investigation revealed that Cullaro had been moonlighting as a document signer for the law firm without telling anyone at her government job. Cullaro was reprimanded and later dismissed from the Attorney General's Office.
"It wasn't fun" turning in a coworker, Clarkson recalls. "It was one of the most horrible experiences I've ever had to go through, besides being fired."
But amid this tempest, Clarkson and Edwards were discovering more and more suspicious documents. With the blessing of Julian and a hunch that something strange was going on, Clarkson and Edwards dug into the ever-deepening piles of papers on their desks.
Before she went on 60 Minutes with revelations of paste-up documents, before she sued her bank, and before she won that suit with an $18 million payout, Lynn Szymoniak could easily have been mistaken for an obsessive nutjob. The living room of her Palm Beach Gardens house contained a wall of binders filled with copies of other people's court records. She burned out one copy machine, and a neighbor donated another. She showed up to meetings with fellow foreclosure activists carrying reams of paper and giant, blown-up copies of documents with obvious mistakes.
If Epstein played the role of the naive newcomer who was surprised at the mistakes she was finding, Szymoniak was the wonkish cynic who figured there must be more. A lawyer with experience investigating white-collar crimes, she had bought a home in 1998 and successfully refinanced in 2006. She says that in early 2008, her bank had raised her interest rate in a technical violation of the terms of her mortgage agreement, so she stopped paying until it could be sorted out. The bank sued for foreclosure that July.
She looked at the assignment of mortgage — a document that proves which bank owns a mortgage, much like a title proves who owns a car — that the bank was using as a basis to seize her home. It was dated September 2008: two months into the future.
Szymoniak asked for more documentation. At first, the servicing company that handled the foreclosure told her it couldn't find the promissory note — an essential document that she signed when she bought the house. By signing a promissory note, the homeowner promises to pay back the bank for a loan to buy a house. Szymoniak says she never received a copy of the promissory note when she initially bought her house.
"A year and a half after my foreclosure was started, they said, 'Eureka! We found the note!' " Szymoniak recalls. She says she was given copies of it, along with two different versions of the "allonge," a page on which the bank endorsed it with an official stamp.
"One of them had a filing strip across the top with a book and page number" indicating where the original version was filed in the courthouse. Ever the skeptic, Szymoniak says she "trooped on down to the courthouse to find what was actually at that book and page number." A clerk helped her pull up the digital file, and Szymoniak was shocked. In the specified place was a different document altogether — although the header and footer matched the copy of the note that the bank had provided.
"Somebody had cut the top strip off my mortgage and the bottom strip and pasted it to the allonge [and then gave me a photocopy]. If you held it up and put it on tracing paper and interposed it, you could tell it was the exact thing."
The bank later blamed a broken copier, but Szymoniak is more blunt: "Documents were being fabricated."
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Time and Limbo Defined
700 days, 104 weeks, 17,544 hours, 1,052,640 minutes 63,158,400 seconds.
Time...the continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past
Limbo...a place or state of oblivion to which persons or things are regarded as being relegated when cast aside, forgotten, past, or out of date: or an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place.
:(
Time...the continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past
Limbo...a place or state of oblivion to which persons or things are regarded as being relegated when cast aside, forgotten, past, or out of date: or an intermediate, transitional, or midway state or place.
:(
Monday, March 4, 2013
Suicide Risk Foreclosures
Economic Factors and Suicide Risk
Economic
Factors
and
Suicide
Risk------------------->
Suicide
Economic
Circumstances: Foreclosure:Eviction: Job loss
Suicide:Bill collectors
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Clearwater mother, her two children found dead in their home
CLEARWATER — William Lavold thought it was a bad joke or a poorly worded expression. Anything other than what it really was.
“I need your help,” the text message said. “Dawn killed the kids.”
It came from his best friend, Murphy Brown. And it meant exactly what it said.
Sometime Friday night, Brown’s wife, Dawn, killed their two
children — Zander, 9, and Zayden, 5 — authorities believe. They say she
then wrapped an electrical cord around her throat, tied it to a ceiling fan and hanged herself.
Lavold said Pinellas County sheriff’s
investigators told him she drowned the children in a bathtub. Officials
said they would not release a cause of death until after an autopsy.
Some neighbors said the killings were unthinkable, something they never expected. Others had seen it coming for months.
A series of setbacks and wrong turns — punctuated by an arrest and financial ruin — had ripped the family apart.
FORECLOSURE WAS THE FINAL STRAW
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JP Morgan Chase Sued in Wrongful Death Lawsuit
A Texas woman filed a wrongful death suit against banking giant JP Morgan Chase alleging her husband suffered a fatal heart attack two years ago as the direct result of foreclosure proceedings from the bank. Harry Engel, a retired minister from Texas, collapsed in his home days after receiving an eviction notice from JP Morgan Chase. His wife, Wanda Jo Engel, recently filed the lawsuit in Dallas County Court and alleges the foreclosure was wrongful and that the bank’s actions left her husband “overwhelmed” in the days prior to his death.The Engels had been living in the home for 22 years and paid their mortgage regularly. A notice from the bank advised the couple to refinance their home. After speaking with an employee at the JP Morgan Chase, the Engels followed the employee’s advice to “miss a payment” in order to better receive government refinancing assistance. It was a move they would wholeheartedly regret.
After missing the payment, the bank sent a letter to the Engels asking them to make the missing payment, but the Engels had already spent the allotted payment on other bills because of their fixed income. After being rejected for a government refinancing program, the bank sent notification that they planned to foreclose and evict the Engels.
A Family Torn Apart
Both parties’ account of the story begins to differ at this point. JP Morgan Chase maintains that the bank never filed for foreclosure in court, but instead notified the Engels that the house would soon be in foreclosure. Wanda Jo Engel say that an employee physically came to her home and served an eviction notice which triggered her husband’s eventual death.“It was just a close family; it’s been a difficult loss,” the Engels’ lawyer Steve Shaver said. “They certainly didn’t expect Mr. Engel to pass when he did or certainly for the reasons he did.” Shaver does however maintain that JP Morgan Chase never did file officially for foreclosure in a court. Two years later, the family’s home now stands vacant, but the Engels will tell you that they were left without something far more important than their home.
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JP Morgan Chase Sued for Causing Wrongful Death by Foreclosure
Harry Engel, a retired minister and resident of Grand Prairie, TX, passed away in July 2010. His wife and children have now filed a wrongful death claim against JP Morgan Chase and two other defendants in Dallas County Court.
The allegation is that the defendants – JP Morgan Chase, LPS Field Services and EMC Mortgage, caused intentional infliction of emotional distress. The defendants are also charged with gross negligence, trespassing and wrongful foreclosure. Not to mention deceptive trade and outright fraud.
The Engels had been living in their home and paying off the mortgage for 22 years. In Feb 2010, they got a letter from Chase saying that the mortgage could be refinanced on a lower monthly payment. When they went to the bank, a Chase employee named Michael Paretti allegedly advised them to deliberately miss one payment so that they could quality for refinancing.
Chase then sent them a letter saying their loan modification application was rejected and they would have to bring their mortgage current immediately. They met with Mr. Paretti again, and were instructed to pay in an amount. They did pay in said amount, but more letters followed, including a foreclosure notice and then an eviction notice.
Harry Engel was terrified at the thought of losing his home and collapsed under the stress on July 1, 2010, a few days after getting the eviction notice. He died of the stress induced heart attack in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
JP Morgan Chase then evicted Harry Engel's newly widowed wife Wanda Engel from their marital home and changed the locks. Harry and Wanda Engel had been married for 57 years and had three adult children – Debra, Steve and Josh Engel.
The house is now empty and managed by LPS Field Services. EMC Mortgage was the foreclosure company used by Chase. The lawsuit seeks to reclaim the house and damages for loss of love and counsel, funeral expenses, future loss of companionship, loss of inheritance and all legal expenses, among other things.
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11/09/2012 @ 8:33PM |13,061 views
Spanish Woman Commits Suicide As Foreclosure Agents Walk Into Her Apartment
The Spanish city of Barakaldo, in the Basque country - Photo credit: Wikipedia
Spain has been one of the hardest hit victims of the European sovereign debt crisis. Mired in a deep recession, the Iberian nation has seen the unemployment rate skyrocket above 25%, with youth joblessness reaching 50%. The consequence of a real estate bubble, Spain’s crisis has led to a slew of foreclosures across the nation.
The latest victim has been Amaya Egaña, a former municipal councilwoman for the Socialist Party. According to Spanish daily El Pais, Egaña jumped to her death from a sixth-floor balcony on Friday as a legal team from the local court walked into her apartment to foreclose on her. Receiving no response after ringing the bell and knocking on the door, a locksmith opened the door, only to find Egaña standing on a chair to jump from her balcony. Egaña was found alive, but paramedics had no chances of saving her life.
Egaña’s suicide isn’t the first related to foreclosures in Spain. Just a few weeks ago, on October 25, 53-year-old Jose Miguel Domingo was found dead hours before foreclosure agents arrived at his apartment. Domingo hung himself after not having been able to pay interest payments on a €240,000 mortgage that went sour in 2009.
A day after, a man whose name hasn’t been disclosed jumped from his window in the city of Valencia. The man attempted to commit suicide minutes before foreclosure agents arrived at his apartment; this time, though, paramedics managed to save his life.
The suicide of Egaña has been like the straw that broke the camel’s back. A social repudiation of banks’ foreclosure practices has made its way to Madrid, where the Administration of Mariano Rajoy is working on a plan to give subprime debtors some relief. According to El Pais, Rajoy is looking to put into place a two year foreclosure moratorium for subprime debtors.
Spanish banks are in dire need of cash. Despite a €100 billion bailout-pledge by the EU, Spanish financials, from Bankia which has already been bailed out to major global banks like BBVA, are looking to strengthen their balance sheets. Much like in the U.S., they are doing whatever they can to extract payment from debtors.
In the U.S., banks’ attempts to speed up the foreclosure processes resulted in the robo-signing scandal, by which major mortgage originators were using fraudulent protocols to processes thousands of mortgages in record time. Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally Financial were forced to fork over $25 billion to settle a suit brought Attorneys General from across the nation.
With Spain falling even deeper into the rabbit hole, as Rajoy refuses to take a bailout and borrowing costs rise, the situation could deteriorate further. Beyond economic losses, Friday’s events are direct evidence that financial crises have the potential to destroy the lives of ordinary individuals.
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Norman Rousseau, Foreclosure Victim, Commits Suicide During Wells Fargo Lawsuit
The Huffington Post
|
By Harry Bradford
Posted: 05/17/2012 2:23 pm Updated: 05/17/2012 3:42 pm
Rousseau, who lived in Newbury Park, California, has left a wife and stepson to deal with an ongoing battle with Wells Fargo, according to a lawsuit filed in January 2011 by Norman and his wife, Oriane (h/t Alternet).
“Our thoughts are with the friends and family of Mr. Rousseau at this difficult time. The eviction has been postponed and we will continue to work with Mrs. Rousseau," a Wells Fargo spokesperson said to The Huffington Post in an email. "Despite current reports, we tried repeatedly to find affordable options for the family."
The trouble started when the Rousseaus refinanced their mortgage, finding out much later that their interest rate actually increased after they did so, the lawsuit states. On top of that, the lawsuit claims that the couple was convinced to roll their credit card debt into the loan, ostensibly prolonging and increasing that debt as well, according to Chris Gardas, the attorney representing the Rousseau family.
At the time, the deal "tasted like honey" to Rousseau, who believed she and her husband had made a solid financial decision, Gardas told The Huffington Post.
Then in May 2009, Wells Fargo allegedly denied it had received the Rousseaus payment for that month. Later, the bank would change its story, blaming the mix-up on putting a stop on the couple's check, CBS Los Angeles reports.
What ensued were repeated and inaccurate requests for payment from Wells Fargo, along with excessive fees and a denied loan modification, according to the lawsuit. That climaxed in a lockout that appears to have led Norman Rousseau to his death, according to the lawsuit. The eviction has now been delayed two weeks, according to the family's attorney.
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Foreclosure Related Suicide on the Rise
Posted: 07/17/2012 11:15 am
On June 28, 2012, Michael Marin, a millionaire in Arizona, died in a courtroom after being convicted of arson for burning down his mansion because he wasn't able to make his mortgage payments. Initial reports claim that he appeared to put something in his mouth shortly before suffering from convulsions and collapsing after the verdict was read. A container labeled "cyanide" was found in his vehicle.
In May, 2012, California resident Norman Rousseau was attempting to repair his RV so his family would have a place to live after being notified of an upcoming lockout. Mr. Rousseau and his wife had refinanced their home, receiving a higher interest rate than they previously had. Wells Fargo subsequently didn't credit them with a payment, which led to a loan modification denial. Unable to repair the RV, Rousseau was distraught and committed suicide.
These are just a couple examples of foreclosure-related suicides. While the situation may seem hopeless, homeowners should know that there are programs available to help them avoid foreclosure, find alternate housing, and treat their anxiety, stress, or depression. Recent changes to the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) will make more people eligible for a loan modification which will permanently lower their mortgage payment. Bank settlements stemming from allegations of wrongful foreclosure filings have spurred a requirement for some of the top lenders to offer struggling homeowners options to prevent foreclosure, as well. In addition, housing counselors are available and trained to help homeowners find options suitable for their circumstances.
It's important to know, though, that while foreclosure can be a stressful and emotional time, it doesn't have to create despair or hopelessness. In fact, events such as these could create stronger families, a deeper commitment to overcoming challenges, and increased strength as you work toward a brighter future. For instance, some find that stress is relieved after they are relieved of debt after a foreclosure. Others are able to find suitable alternatives to foreclosure.
Create a positive mindset and become your own best advocate, learning your options and persevering. This will help you avoid stress as you continue to fight for your home. Take time out while you seek to save your home to enjoy your family, get some exercise, relax, and do things that make you happy. Above all, remember that you are not alone. Millions of homeowners have also faced foreclosure. Have faith that you are doing everything you can to save your home, while appreciating the people, love, spirituality, joy, and happiness that life offers.
Homeowners who are stressed or suffering from anxiety or depression should seek medical help and counseling. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline lists warning signs of suicide and hosts a suicide prevention hotline, 1-800-273-TALK, to help those in distress.
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Foreclosure notice leads to suicide of 'nice lady'
By Frank Juliano, Staff writer
Published 12:57 am, Sunday, January 3, 2010
MILFORD -- A lot of people say "Over my dead body." Vincenza Garcia meant it.
Rather than comply with a foreclosure notice and allow a marshal to evict her from the home she loved at 55 Earle St., Garcia took her own life on Oct. 1. And, in the eyes of her attorney, her story is emblematic of the devastation the foreclosure epidemic has inflicted on so many once-proud homeowners.
Garcia, who had won the city's Freedom Lawn contest last summer for her beautifully landscaped yard, loved the small house near Point Beach she had owned since 1996.
She was "a nice lady who was always working on her garden," said neighbor Phil Vetro. "Every time I'd see her, she'd be out there working."
But when the introductory "teaser" rate on her newly refinanced mortgage expired, Garcia, who lived alone and was by all accounts a private person, fell hopelessly behind. There were opportunities to dig out from under, or to at least delay, foreclosure as 2009 wore on, but she represented herself and failed to navigate the complex system.
And so, aware that the marshal and a moving crew would be at the tidy gray ranch house before 8 a.m., the 56 year-old woman made her final preparations.
According to an 18-page incident report by the Milford police department, Garcia wrote e-mails to her sister and to her lawyer at 2 a.m., telling them to expect a call in the morning.
She wrote several letters to family and friends, including one in which she enclosed 37 Lotto tickets and wrote "Have fun!" on the envelope.
These were left on the kitchen table, along with a list of her family members and her lawyer, with their phone numbers and a Federal Express package that was found to contain an old black and white photo and two invitations to President George W. Bush's inauguration.
Garcia then filled the first 11 pages of a notebook with messages of love for her family and her last wishes and left that on the nightstand in her bedroom.
The woman put her four cats in the bathroom and closed the door, taping to it a list of their names and her veterinarian's phone number.
And then, according to the police report, she apparently put some music on her stereo, laid down on her bed and fired a single .22-caliber bullet into her head.
When Marshal Neil Longobardi arrived at about 7:30 a.m. he found the sliding door to the deck unlocked, and a note taped to it with names and phone numbers. Eerie "Halloween" music was playing, the marshal said, and there were letters and the package on the table. He called police.
Garcia's brother, who is the executor of her estate and lives on Long Island, did not return phone calls for this story.
West Haven attorney Stephen Small said that Garcia ought to be the human face of the foreclosure crisis. The Milford woman finally hired Small in late August, after the foreclosure had been filed. His appearance notice is the last entry in her thick file in New Haven Superior Court.
"I've seen many, many desperate people in her situation," Small said. Vincenza Garcia is someone "who didn't reach out," her lawyer said, and failed to understand the predatory nature of the loan she agreed to.
Across the country there are tales of how job losses and home foreclosures have driven some to take their lives.
"For the first time in all the years I've done this, I'm hearing things mentioned like, `He lost his job. She lost her house. We're in foreclosure,' " veteran Minnesota medical examiner Dr. Janis Amatuzio told The Star Tribune in December.
In Gaithersburg, Md., four clients of the nonprofit Family Services Inc., which counsels people going through foreclosures, attempted to commit suicide this year, according to The Gazette, a local newspaper.
Experts say that it's always hard to draw explicit conclusions in cases that are likely to involve a host of complex facts. Nonetheless, in Connecticut, suicides were up in 2009 from the year before, according to statistics from the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Garcia's was one of 320 self-inflicted deaths this year, compared to 282 in 2008.
The biggest jump was among her age group, 51 to 60 year olds. They accounted for 71 of the suicides reported in Connecticut this year, compared to 52 in 2008, state figures show.
In Garcia's case, she had no idea of the vulnerable situation she was putting herself into when she agreed to her refinance her home with a sizable, variable-rate mortgage in 2006.
The New York native, divorced since the 1970s, took out a $281,000 mortgage in June, 2006, from Sand Canyon Corp., which had formerly been known as Option One Mortgage Co.
The loan was packaged by Merrill Lynch Corp. as part of its "Investors' Trust Asset-Backed Certificates," but when that company fell on hard times, LaSalle Bank, of West Hartford, was made the trustee of the loan.
When the 6.99 initial interest rate -- nearly 2 points higher than was available from other lenders -- rose to 9.1 percent in June, 2008, Garcia missed a $2,300 monthly payment, and with late fees, liens and other charges, and never caught up.
"It's a machine," Small said of the mortgage refinancing industry. "These people appraise your house for what they need, and the goal is to get the commission. They are kids in boiler rooms all over the country, who send a notary to your house with the papers.
"They'll tell you not to pay your mortgage that month because the new loan will be in effect by the end of it," Small said. "But these people are not your friends and they are not there to explain the paperwork.
"They are there to get you to sign, and by the time you realize that it is a variable rate you have no choice but to sign because you're already behind," he said.
The workout sheet in Garcia's court file shows that the fair market value of her home was $285,000 but her unpaid debt had climbed to $299,570. She had a negative equity of $14,000 in the property.
But Garcia made mistakes too, the biggest of which was not having someone review the loan during the three days she had to pull out of it, Small said.
Then she represented herself at two court mediation hearings, in February and March, at which, according to the file, Garcia admitted that she was in default without offering a modification plan.
In her file is the "Notice of Available Help" given to every property owner in a foreclosure action. It suggests applying for emergency mortgage assistance from the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, among other programs, and carries this warning in boldface type: "You should consult with an attorney to assess your rights under this act."
Rather than comply with a foreclosure notice and allow a marshal to evict her from the home she loved at 55 Earle St., Garcia took her own life on Oct. 1. And, in the eyes of her attorney, her story is emblematic of the devastation the foreclosure epidemic has inflicted on so many once-proud homeowners.
Garcia, who had won the city's Freedom Lawn contest last summer for her beautifully landscaped yard, loved the small house near Point Beach she had owned since 1996.
She was "a nice lady who was always working on her garden," said neighbor Phil Vetro. "Every time I'd see her, she'd be out there working."
But when the introductory "teaser" rate on her newly refinanced mortgage expired, Garcia, who lived alone and was by all accounts a private person, fell hopelessly behind. There were opportunities to dig out from under, or to at least delay, foreclosure as 2009 wore on, but she represented herself and failed to navigate the complex system.
And so, aware that the marshal and a moving crew would be at the tidy gray ranch house before 8 a.m., the 56 year-old woman made her final preparations.
According to an 18-page incident report by the Milford police department, Garcia wrote e-mails to her sister and to her lawyer at 2 a.m., telling them to expect a call in the morning.
She wrote several letters to family and friends, including one in which she enclosed 37 Lotto tickets and wrote "Have fun!" on the envelope.
These were left on the kitchen table, along with a list of her family members and her lawyer, with their phone numbers and a Federal Express package that was found to contain an old black and white photo and two invitations to President George W. Bush's inauguration.
Garcia then filled the first 11 pages of a notebook with messages of love for her family and her last wishes and left that on the nightstand in her bedroom.
The woman put her four cats in the bathroom and closed the door, taping to it a list of their names and her veterinarian's phone number.
And then, according to the police report, she apparently put some music on her stereo, laid down on her bed and fired a single .22-caliber bullet into her head.
When Marshal Neil Longobardi arrived at about 7:30 a.m. he found the sliding door to the deck unlocked, and a note taped to it with names and phone numbers. Eerie "Halloween" music was playing, the marshal said, and there were letters and the package on the table. He called police.
Garcia's brother, who is the executor of her estate and lives on Long Island, did not return phone calls for this story.
West Haven attorney Stephen Small said that Garcia ought to be the human face of the foreclosure crisis. The Milford woman finally hired Small in late August, after the foreclosure had been filed. His appearance notice is the last entry in her thick file in New Haven Superior Court.
"I've seen many, many desperate people in her situation," Small said. Vincenza Garcia is someone "who didn't reach out," her lawyer said, and failed to understand the predatory nature of the loan she agreed to.
Across the country there are tales of how job losses and home foreclosures have driven some to take their lives.
"For the first time in all the years I've done this, I'm hearing things mentioned like, `He lost his job. She lost her house. We're in foreclosure,' " veteran Minnesota medical examiner Dr. Janis Amatuzio told The Star Tribune in December.
In Gaithersburg, Md., four clients of the nonprofit Family Services Inc., which counsels people going through foreclosures, attempted to commit suicide this year, according to The Gazette, a local newspaper.
Experts say that it's always hard to draw explicit conclusions in cases that are likely to involve a host of complex facts. Nonetheless, in Connecticut, suicides were up in 2009 from the year before, according to statistics from the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Garcia's was one of 320 self-inflicted deaths this year, compared to 282 in 2008.
The biggest jump was among her age group, 51 to 60 year olds. They accounted for 71 of the suicides reported in Connecticut this year, compared to 52 in 2008, state figures show.
In Garcia's case, she had no idea of the vulnerable situation she was putting herself into when she agreed to her refinance her home with a sizable, variable-rate mortgage in 2006.
The New York native, divorced since the 1970s, took out a $281,000 mortgage in June, 2006, from Sand Canyon Corp., which had formerly been known as Option One Mortgage Co.
The loan was packaged by Merrill Lynch Corp. as part of its "Investors' Trust Asset-Backed Certificates," but when that company fell on hard times, LaSalle Bank, of West Hartford, was made the trustee of the loan.
When the 6.99 initial interest rate -- nearly 2 points higher than was available from other lenders -- rose to 9.1 percent in June, 2008, Garcia missed a $2,300 monthly payment, and with late fees, liens and other charges, and never caught up.
"It's a machine," Small said of the mortgage refinancing industry. "These people appraise your house for what they need, and the goal is to get the commission. They are kids in boiler rooms all over the country, who send a notary to your house with the papers.
"They'll tell you not to pay your mortgage that month because the new loan will be in effect by the end of it," Small said. "But these people are not your friends and they are not there to explain the paperwork.
"They are there to get you to sign, and by the time you realize that it is a variable rate you have no choice but to sign because you're already behind," he said.
The workout sheet in Garcia's court file shows that the fair market value of her home was $285,000 but her unpaid debt had climbed to $299,570. She had a negative equity of $14,000 in the property.
But Garcia made mistakes too, the biggest of which was not having someone review the loan during the three days she had to pull out of it, Small said.
Then she represented herself at two court mediation hearings, in February and March, at which, according to the file, Garcia admitted that she was in default without offering a modification plan.
In her file is the "Notice of Available Help" given to every property owner in a foreclosure action. It suggests applying for emergency mortgage assistance from the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, among other programs, and carries this warning in boldface type: "You should consult with an attorney to assess your rights under this act."
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AZUSA, Calif. -- Authorities say three people found dead in a fire-gutted home in Southern California were all siblings who committed suicide.
The three were found dead Dec. 6 in the aftermath of a house fire in Azusa. Also discovered at the home were two dead dogs and two dead cats, along with 22 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Public records show the house was in foreclosure, and family friend Nora Dewester told the Tribune that the siblings were expected to move out the day they died. Friends also say the siblings' father died earlier this year and their mother died several years ago.
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http://www.datamasher.org/mash-ups/number-deaths-due-suicide-100k-foreclosure-rates
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