The Rise And Fall Of A Foreclosure King - AP

[WillyT]

The rise and fall of a foreclosure king
By MICHELLE CONLIN, AP Business Writer
Sun Feb 6, 7:29 pm ET

<snip>

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – During the housing crash, it was good to be a foreclosure king. David Stern was Florida's top foreclosure lawyer, and he lived like an oil sheik. He piled up a collection of trophy properties, glided through town in a fleet of six-figure sports cars and, with his bombshell wife, partied on an ocean cruiser the size of a small hotel.



When homeowners fell behind on their mortgages, the banks flocked to "foreclosure mills" like Stern's to push foreclosures through the courts on their behalf. To his megabank clients — Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, GMAC, Citibank and Wells Fargo — Stern was the ultimate Repo Man.

At industry gatherings, Stern bragged in his boyish voice of taking mortgages from the "cradle to the grave." Of the federal government's disastrous homeowner relief plan, which was supposed to keep people from getting evicted, he quipped: "Fortunately, it's failing." The worse things got for homeowners, the better they got for Stern.

That is, until last fall, when the nation's foreclosure machine blew apart and Stern's gilded world came undone. Within a few months, Stern went from being the subject of a gushing magazine profile to being the subject of a Florida investigation, class-action lawsuits and blogger Schadenfreude that, at last long, the "foreclosure king" was dead.

"What Stern represents is an industry that was completely unrestrained, unchecked, unpunished and unsupervised," says Florida defense attorney Matt Weidner. "This was business gone wild."

<snip>

More: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110207/ap_on_bi_ge/us_the_foreclosure_king

And More: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/florida-foreclosure-mill-king-david-stern-shows-crime-sure-did-pay.html

And More More: http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/02/07/david-j-stern-bandleader-for-a-symphony-of-foreclosure-fraud/

:kick:

[PassingFair]

1. America IS "business gone wild.."

We've been living in a culture where ethically
challenged business people cheat until someone
catches them, then claim that the didn't know
they were cheating.

Or that the cheating has been made legal.

[lpbk2713]

6. BushCo got away with so much corruption at the top ...

that the relative small timers thought they would not be noticed so
they thought it would be worth running the risk of getting caught.
I'm glad to see it didn't work out in this case.

[lapislzi]

2. Sadly, this crook will probably be back in business before long

People like that rarely go broke in a big way. It's the poor bastard whose got one late payment who winds up eating shit sandwiches for the rest of his life.

[flvegan]

3. Rec'd without comment.

[DirkGently]

4. One of the better stories on this out there. Important to note the banks' culpability, though.

As the article notes, foreclosure rates start out incredibly cheap for the banks in the first place, and then they deduct from the lawyers' fee for missing deadlines or taking too long, despite the fact they fail to provide their own attorneys with vital original documents, affidavits, etc.

Large-scale foreclosure operations arose to satisfy a need, created by banks, for ever faster, ever cheaper foreclosures. Lawyers who take their time, get the facts straight, and insist on proper communication with the borrower / defendants, have been steadily swept aside in favor of the big shops, who work at a bank-mandated pace that literally precludes responsible conduct.

This is all exacerbated by the size of the banks themselves, which as they have consolidated, have gained the ability to grant and take away huge volumes of business, creating and destroying law practices at will.



edited for everything.

[delightfulstar]

5. As the old cliché goes...

The bigger they come, the harder they fall. This man made money off the backs of unsuspecting homeowners who were swindled into unethical, illegal financial transactions, and he laughed all the way to the bank, for a time. People who played and defrauded the public that way should do time, IMHO.

[WillyT]

7. Kick !!!

:kick: