Dave Collins, at the Day, informs us that Andrew Lockwood is once again running for office, this time for State Representative. Collins chose to concentrate on Lockwood’s tendency to leave his taxes unpaid. Perhaps Collins forgets that for the GOP, that’s a plus. After all, who better to represent a party with a no-tax mantra than a person who pays no taxes.
Lockwood ran for the New London City Council before, and I believe I wrote about my own experiences with him at that time, but since he’s put himself forward again, I feel it my duty to repeat myself, for if I can dissuade even one person from voting for him, I will have done a good deed.
Lockwood was involved in my first exposure to the subprime mortgage business. In this case, to call the loans subprime is giving a false impression. They were subprime to the fourth or fifth power. Here is the substance of the complaint that I brought on behalf of three sets of homeowners against Lockwood, a closing attorney, and, I think, the appraiser and loan broker. My memory is hazy on the latter point. I should have sued the lender, but I was young and naive. These events took place in, I believe, 2000 or thereabouts.
I had four clients, two single women and a married couple. The married couple were on SSI, a government program that supplies a subsistence level of income for disabled people. This is politically incorrect, I know, but I’ll use the term anyway: they were mentally retarded. All of my clients were incredibly poor.
Lockwood bought three distressed properties in New London, none of which cost him more than $20,000.00. He made little or no improvements. He talked my clients into buying them (none of them were aware of his purchase prices) and “helped” them with the application process. Through his good offices, my retarded client (the male) was transformed into a $5,000.00 per month manager of a car dealership Lockwood owned at the time, without ever having to go to work or draw a paycheck. The houses appraised out at between $80,000 to $100,000.00 each, meaning Lockwood turned an obscene profit. I had a real appraiser take a look at them and-but you can guess-he disagreed with those figures. Each client got a mortgage they couldn’t possibly afford to pay, each of which had a balloon feature that they were doomed to be unable to satisfy, had they somehow made the payments prior to the balloon payment. The closing documents showed down payments that were never made. When I brought these facts to the lender’s attention, it was curiously complacent about them. Silly me, in my naivete, believing that the lender would care that the loan would never be repaid. It had, of course, long since been collateralized and sold.
In the end, because of the litigation, the fraud was somewhat victimless, except for the bank that ended up with the paper. My clients got free housing for awhile (it was literally impossible for them to make the payments), then got out from under the mortgage, and got some money into the bargain. None of it came from Lockwood, of course. I knew right away that he was the type of guy who would never have assets that anyone could find, though he would always find a way of living a comfortable life.
According to Collins, Lockwood has a law degree, but is not a lawyer because he has thrice flunked the bar, something that in my humble opinion takes special talent. I hope and pray that practice doesn’t make perfect.
So, if any 39th District voters come upon this, please consider carefully whether you want to send a guy like Lockwood to Hartford. I suppose he could argue that he would have a head start on his fellow representatives, but personally I think that a legislator should wait until after they’re elected before becoming a crook.
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