[nfb-talk] A Worthier Cause

[ckrugman at sbcglobal.net]

Hi Joe,
thanks for posting this. I have a friend here in California who is currently 
litigating against Bank of America due to the same type of questionable 
dealings on the part of Wilshire. This will be quite helpful I think.
regards.
Chuck
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joe Orozco" <jsorozco at gmail.com>
To: "'NFB Talk Mailing List'" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2010 1:45 PM
Subject: [nfb-talk] A Worthier Cause


> Maybe ABC should consider devoting its show to topics like the one below
> rather than trying to help isolated families but do not help the problem.
> Sorry for the off-topic post, but it's in the realm of what our office 
> does,
> and I thought it might help us explore other aspects of the popular 
> subject
> recently discussed.--Joe
>
> December 3, 2010
>
>
>
> A Happy Ending to a Raw, but Common, Tale
>
>  By JOE NOCERA
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/josephnocera/?inline=ny
> t-per>
>
>
>
> Lilla Roberts is a 73-year-old retired physical therapist, a pleasant,
> engaging woman who moved to this country from Jamaica 46 years ago. In 
> 1988,
> she bought a small house in Jamaica, Queens, putting down $25,000, and
> taking out a mortgage for around $120,000. For many years, she religiously
> made her mortgage payments.
>
>
>
> Like most homes in this part of Queens, this one is a little on the
> ramshackle side: a small, two-story home, part brick, part faded gray
> siding, with a red awning out front and a large backyard. But she raised 
> her
> children and several of her grandchildren in this home. Her life's 
> memories
> are in this home. It means a lot to her.
>
>
>
> "My whole life is here," she said on Tuesday, when I visited her. "Every
> penny I ever had I put into this house."
>
>
>
> Ms. Roberts pointed down. "I finished the basement," she said. She pointed
> up. "I had to put in new windows and repair all the rotting wood," she 
> said,
> referring to an upstairs apartment she rents out.
>
>
>
> She pointed toward the back of the house, to the yard beyond her cramped
> kitchen and her two crowded bedrooms. "I love my garden," she said. She
> paused, and then sighed. Between her pension, Social Security
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_secur
> ity_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  and rental income, she said, "I
> have enough income to pay my mortgage. I would love to enjoy the rest of 
> my
> life here."
>
>
>
> Sitting across from Ms. Roberts was Elizabeth Lynch, a 30-something lawyer
> who works for MFY Legal Services. Ms. Lynch is a foreclosure specialist 
> who
> has spent the last few months trying desperately to keep Ms. Roberts from
> losing her home. In 2007, a year after a refinancing, Ms. Roberts suffered 
> a
> temporary setback that caused her to stop paying her mortgage for less 
> than
> a year. Given her situation - steady income, a history of reliability - 
> you
> would think that she would be a perfect candidate for a mortgage
> modification.
>
>
>
> Instead, her servicer, Bank of America
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/bank_of_america_corpo
> ration/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , foreclosed on the property in late
> August and handed it off to Fannie Mae
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/fannie_mae/index.html
> ?inline=nyt-org> , which owned the mortgage. Ms. Roberts first learned 
> this
> when she saw Fannie Mae's eviction notice taped to her front door.
>
>
>
> As part of her effort to save Ms. Roberts' house, Ms. Lynch filed a 
> lawsuit
> to undo the foreclosure, on the grounds that fraud had been committed at
> various points along the way. Although such suits rarely succeed, a judge
> agreed to hear the case in early January.
>
>
>
> Another part of her effort, though, was to try to create some media
> interest, which is how I got involved. "With all of the foreclosure cases 
> I
> have seen," Ms. Lynch wrote in an e-mail, "this is the one that gets at me
> the most."
>
>
>
> Truth to tell, Ms. Roberts's story got to me too. Even putting aside the
> possibility of fraud, nobody should have to endure what she's been 
> through.
> Since March 2008 - that's right, two and a half years - she has spent 
> nearly
> $30,000 trying to hold onto her home. She has had to deal with a nasty
> foreclosure mill law firm, with servicing employees who gave her the
> runaround and with a foreclosure process that took place behind her back.
> And she has had to deal with the anxiety of not knowing whether she would 
> be
> able to keep her home.
>
>
>
> Yes, there are people who took out mortgages knowing they could never pay
> the money back. Ms. Roberts is not one of them. Rather, she is one of the
> many Americans, mostly poor and lower-middle class, who have been 
> devastated
> by a system that is as rapacious, uncaring - and sloppy - in tossing 
> people
> out of their homes as it once was in foisting predatory mortgages on them.
>
>
>
> Two days after I spoke with Ms. Roberts, Bank of America and Fannie Mae
> acknowledged that foreclosing on her home had been a mistake, and they 
> vowed
> to give her back the house. "We are going to work with her on a loan
> modification
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/loans/loan-modifications/index.html?in
> line=nyt-classifier> ," a Bank of America spokesman promised.
>
>
>
> Yet, while Ms. Roberts's story has a happy ending, it is hard to get too
> excited - not when so many others are in the same awful place, losing 
> homes
> as much because of the system's callousness as because of their own
> precarious finances.
>
>
>
> .
>
>
>
> Ms. Roberts's troubles began with the rotting wood and upstairs windows. 
> In
> 2006, her longtime tenant, who paid her $600 a month, moved out; she 
> needed
> to fix the apartment before she could get a new tenant. The only way she
> could afford it was by refinancing her home.
>
>
>
> The company that gave her the new mortgage was a now-bankrupt outfit,
> Mortgage Lenders Network, which a former employee described to me as "one 
> of
> the bad actors" during the subprime bubble. It is hard to know now what 
> kind
> of mortgage Ms. Roberts got; although it had a fixed interest rate below 6
> percent, Ms. Roberts recalls having very little cash left over after the
> repairs were made - even though, at more than $300,000, the new mortgage 
> was
> more than double the size of her original mortgage. Her new monthly 
> payment
> was around $1,700 a month, a $500 increase. But with a new renter paying
> $900 a month, she felt it was well within her means.
>
>
>
> Sometime in 2007, however, the tenant stopped paying his rent. Thanks to 
> New
> York's tough rental laws, she couldn't easily evict him. Without that $900 
> a
> month, she couldn't make ends meet and still pay her mortgage. Thus it was
> that in March 2008, she requested a mortgage modification from her 
> servicer,
> the Wilshire Credit Corporation, a division of Merrill Lynch
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/merrill_lynch_and_com
> pany/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  that specialized in delinquent mortgages.
>
>
>
> What happened over the course of the next few years can only be described 
> as
> Kafka-esque. Wilshire Credit asked her for a hardship letter; she sent 
> one.
> Nothing happened. Three separate times, Wilshire set up short-term payment
> agreements - two of which included $7,000 upfront payments - claiming that
> it would make a decision on a long-term modification once the agreement
> expired. She paid every penny - to no avail.
>
>
>
> Sometimes, when she was between short-term agreements, Wilshire would 
> refuse
> to take her check. Sometimes, it cashed them. Sometimes she was told her
> request for a modification had been denied. Other times she was told it 
> was
> being considered. At one point, the foreclosure mill law firm of Steven J.
> Baum, which represented Wilshire, tried to get her to waive her legal 
> rights
> as part of the third short-term agreement. (The firm would not discuss the
> details of the case on the record.) All the while, behind Ms. Roberts's
> back, Wilshire was inching toward foreclosure.
>
>
>
> In March 2010, Bank of America, which got Wilshire when it bought Merrill
> Lynch in 2008, sold the servicing company to I.B.M.
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/international_busines
> s_machines/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  As part of the deal, though, it 
> kept
> Wilshire's servicing clients.
>
>
>
> Was life any better with the mighty Bank of America now servicing her
> mortgage? Not a chance. Bank of America took her money in May and June. 
> But
> in July and again in August, a bank employee told her not to send a 
> payment
> because the bank was close to offering her a new repayment plan. Instead, 
> in
> late August, the bank foreclosed and turned the property over to Fannie 
> Mae.
>
>
>
>
> After taking on Ms. Roberts's case, Ms. Lynch uncovered the unseemly back
> story - a story that is playing out in poor neighborhoods all over the
> country. She found clear evidence of robosigning. She also discovered that
> the transfer of the mortgage from Mortgage Lenders Network to Wilshire
> appeared to have been backdated by two years - making it appear that it 
> took
> place before M.L.N.'s bankruptcy. Assets cannot be sold by a bankrupt
> company without the assent of a trustee, thus suggesting that the transfer
> of Ms. Roberts's mortgage might have been improper. And she found evidence
> that Ms. Roberts had never been served with the foreclosure papers -
> something Ms. Roberts swore to in an affidavit. These are the grounds for
> her lawsuit.
>
>
>
> But as I discovered when I began asking around, the story is even worse 
> than
> that. Why did Fannie Mae begin eviction proceedings? Because Bank of 
> America
> claimed, wrongly, that Ms. Roberts was a deadbeat who hadn't made a 
> mortgage
> payment since March 2008. When Fannie Mae asked the bank to double-check,
> Bank of America simply repeated this false information. In other words, 
> Ms.
> Roberts was being thrown out of her house because of Bank of America's
> carelessness.
>
>
>
> Stunned at what I was hearing, I sent James Mahoney, a bank spokesman, a
> copy of Ms. Roberts's legal complaint, which documented all the payments
> she'd made over the year. Less than 24 hours later, he called to tell me
> that the bank had requested a "rescission" of the foreclosure sale to 
> Fannie
> Mae - and that "this decision is receiving favorable consideration from
> Fannie."
>
>
>
> To Mr. Mahoney, this reversal showed that Bank of America was trying to do
> right by homeowners. "We have made 700,000 mortgage modifications this
> year," he said. He described the bank's willingness to give Ms. Roberts a
> loan modification as a "microcosm of Bank of America's role" in the
> foreclosure crisis. I agree that it's a microcosm, though not necessarily 
> in
> the same way that Mr. Mahoney does.
>
>
>
> To my surprise, when I called Ms. Lynch with the good news late Thursday,
> she did not jump for joy. Although she was pleased for her client, she was
> furious at what she saw as Bank of America's presumption.
>
>
>
> "It's offensive that BofA thinks a foreclosure action, an eviction notice 
> of
> an elderly woman sitting in her house fearing that she will spend the
> remainder of her days in a shelter, is some sort of party invitation that
> can be 'rescinded,' " she wrote in an e-mail. "Their disrespect for the 
> law
> is appalling. But it is a pattern of behavior that led to this crisis and
> that is continuing to keep this country in this crisis."
>
>
>
> Let's face it: Ms. Roberts got a break. Because she had a dogged lawyer, 
> who
> had the wit to get a New York Times columnist interested in her case, a
> terrible mistake was uncovered. As a result, an unjustified foreclosure 
> may
> well be reversed.
>
>
>
> But it has to make you wonder how many other people have lost their homes
> because of similar mistakes. I can't bear to venture a guess. It's too
> sickening to contemplate.
>
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