CT Blue

A bit of both good and funny news from Florida:

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Last year, Warren and Maureen Nyerges, a retired couple in Naples, Florida, were hit with a mistaken foreclosure lawsuit by the Bank of America (remember, it’s the Bank of Satan). They had paid cash for their house in 2009, no mortgage, and thus no grounds for a foreclosure suit. The bank dropped the case but never reimbursed the Nyerges for their attorney’s fees.

Yesterday, their lawyer and a couple cops went into the local BofA branch and threatened to start taking furniture unless the manager cut a check for the $2,534 in lawyer’s fees right then and there. It worked!

Their lawyer, a badass by the name of Todd Allen, said before entering the bank: “I’m leaving the building with either cash, a check or a whole lot of furniture.” Allen had tried to wheedle the money out of the bank to no avail; long story short, things degenerated to the point of Allen having to “stride” into the bank with “two burly Collier County sheriff’s deputies,” a moving company waiting outside to take BofA’s stuff.

Congratulations to Todd Allen. While I’m sure he actually preferred to get his money, speaking for the rest of us it’s a shame that they didn’t have to take the furniture.

This case brought to mind an experience I had some years ago with MERS, the organization that holds nominal title to millions of mortgages so that banks can play games with the title without, you know, actually telling anyone. Were anyone else to do what the banks do through MERS, they would be considered common criminals engaged in a conspiracy to commit fraud, but, seeing as they’re banks, no one seems to mind.

Anyway, I had a case years ago in which MERS was the nominal plaintiff. They were foreclosing on my client. This was not a subprime case; it actually hearkened back to a more time honored type of fraud. My client had been scammed by a home improvement contractor who arranged a second mortgage through whatever bank had originally held title in the first place. Consumer protection laws passed in the 60s and 70s changed previous “holder in due course” rules, which essentially allowed banks to avoid responsibility for the folks who were using them to defraud, so I was able to raise the fraud as a defense and counterclaim directly against MERS. Judge Hurley, bless his memory, who could be a bit of a curmudgeon but was basically sympathetic toward the defrauded, voided the mortgage and awarded me attorneys fees.

That was when I discovered what a shadowy organization MERS actually was. They were probably not used to being on the receiving end of a judgment, but in any event, voluntary payment seemed to be out of the question. Their attorney went silent. Just locating them, even given the Google, was a major feat, not to mention figuring out how to get their attention. Keep in mind that the whole point of a title system is to enable anyone interested in knowing to figure out precisely who owns a given piece of property. MERS didn’t go out of its way to help inquiring minds on that or any score.

I have never been terribly aggressive when it comes to going after debtors, but at the time we had an associate (now gone on to where she is more appreciated) and occasional reader of this blog who was, to put it mildly, implacable. I handed it over to her with the same alacrity with which she took it on. She got the money, but it wasn’t easy. I’ve no doubt that had it been necessary, she would have had a moving van at the MERS office, assuming there is a brick and mortar office somewhere.

The common thread in both cases is the inability of these banker types to accept that the law isn’t always there to serve their interests. Every once in a while the little guy breaks through, and when he does they simply can’t understand it, and certainly can’t accept that sometimes the rules really do apply to them.