by Tanta on 2/26/2008 11:54:00 AM

Some day I will learn to stop ignoring stuff. I saw this Bloomberg piece on the day it was published, my eyes rolled into the back of my head, and I realized that on a good day I haven't got the ability to unscramble this frittata of anecdote, conflation, fact and side-issue in less than 10,000 words. I certainly have a hard time doing that temporarily blinded. But I have now received a round dozen emails from you all drawing my attention to it, plus all the uncounted times it has come up in the comments. Okay, fine.

The thing starts off with its one and only specific example, and it's a doozy:

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Joe Lents hasn't made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That's when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton, Florida. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents's mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

``If you're going to take my house away from me, you better own the note,'' said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

"Former CEO" seems a tad bit complimentary to Lents here--perhaps Bloomberg is afraid of getting sued by this particular piece of work. We do get this:

Lents is former CEO of Investco Inc., a Boca Raton, Florida-based developer of voice recognition software. In 2002, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned Lents and others for stock manipulation, according to the SEC Web site. He lost his job, was fined and his assets were frozen. That's the reason he couldn't pay his mortgage, he said.

Well, I never miss an opportunity to go wade through the SEC website. As far as I can determine, Lents cooked up a pump-and-dump scheme, and then found a company he could take over to implement it. This part is amusing: "Investco, Inc. is a Nevada corporation headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. Investco formerly purported to be a provider of voice recognition technology and now claims to be a provider of financial services." If it takes one to know one, we have one.

This article from January in the South Florida Business Journal gives us a touch more color on the Lents foreclosure:

Somebody has been trying to foreclose on Joseph Lents' Boca Raton home for five years. So far, they have been unsuccessful because he has legally fought them every step of the way. . . .

"I probably have been to the Palm Beach County courthouse 100 times or more over the last five years, just to observe," Lents said. "In 99 percent of the residential foreclosure cases, plaintiffs are asking the court to accept a promissory note copy as the original because it is presumed lost."

Resistance doesn't come cheap. Lents has paid more than $120,000 in legal fees and costs so far to save his 5-acre, $2.5 million home. . . .

The Lentses built their home in 1992 and, on May 15, 2001, according to public records, refinanced it for $1.49 million with Washington Mutual Bank (NYSE: WM).

Lents, a retired CPA, lost his corporate job in 2002 when the SEC charged the company he led (Ivesco/Intraco) with a pump-and-dump scheme, according to SEC documents. While the SEC agreed that Lents had not made money - he actually lost money on the transactions - the damage was done. His income stopped and he fell five months behind on his mortgage payments.

"I tried contacting WaMu [Washington Mutual] and couldn't get through to anyone who could help me reset or recast the mortgage," Lents said. He contacted the mortgage broker, Express Financial, which had helped him shop around for the best mortgage in 2001. "They contacted WaMu and were told it couldn't do anything because, even though they were servicing the mortgage, the loan had been sold. It was a Catch-22," Lents said.

In January 2003, WaMu filed for foreclosure against the Lentses.

Where's the note?

The first count of the complaint was curious, according to Lents. It said the $1.49 million promissory note was lost.

"Now, I have audited a number of banks and credit unions in my time, and I can tell you they don't lose million-dollar notes," Lents said. "If auto dealers can keep track of auto titles, surely banks can keep track of promissory notes."

West Palm Beach attorney Brook Fisher filed an objection, and WaMu filed an affidavit, swearing the note had been lost.

The employee who filed the lost note affidavit was deposed. Under sworn testimony, she said she hadn't searched for the note and just signed a stack of lost note affidavits.

WaMu's attorney filed for summary judgment in 2003. However, since the facts surrounding the allegedly lost note were in dispute, the judge set the case for trial and allowed discovery for records and depositions.

Lents acknowledged that he owed the money, but would only pay the legal note holder, whoever that might be.

In October 2003, WaMu dismissed the suit.

Nothing more happened until February 2005, when Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette (acquired in 2000 by Credit Suisse) filed a foreclosure suit against the Lentses.

In a September 2005 mediation meeting, the attorney representing Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette said it had paid a premium for the Lentses' mortgage, apparently purchased as part of a package of non-performing loans. . . .

The Lentses' case is coming to a head. A hearing is set for Jan. 8 in which Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette is seeking summary judgment. Their attorney, Miami-based Jane Serene Raskin of Raskin & Raskin, will probably be asking for the same thing. (She did not return calls for comment.)

I have so far been unable to find an update on the DLJ hearing. I cannot even tell, from this narrative, whether DLJ was the "investor" to whom WaMu had sold the loan at the time it defaulted, or if WaMu subsequently sold the loan to DLJ after it dismissed FC proceedings, as a "non-performing loan." If the latter is the case, I admit I'd like to know just how much "premium" DLJ paid for it. (Note to the irony impaired: no, I don't want to know that. I sleep better not knowing that.)

So here's what seems to be the deal. Lents, who knows a little something about obfuscation and has a lot of free time since the SEC took care of his employment opportunities, hung out at the courthouse long enough to notice that FCs are routinely filed with either a certified true copy of the promissory note or a Lost Note Affidavit (LNA), which in every instance I have ever personally seen is a sworn statement that the original note is lost, and is accompanied by a certified true copy of the lost original. (It is theoretically possible to submit an LNA without a copy, if there were a case that both the original and all copies of the note were lost. However, there would have to be other documents attached to the LNA that would provide evidence that it once existed, such as other closing documents, the loan payment history, a sworn statement of the notary or escrow officer, etc. As I said, I've never actually seen an LNA without a copy of the note attached to it.)

Having noticed that, Lents filed an objection to the FC based on the dubious standing of the LNA; discovery proceeded and it turned out, not surprisingly to me, that there was no particular evidence that WaMu had lost the note. Someone simply decided that the quick and easy way to process a batch of foreclosure filings was to grab the copy of the note that was easily available in the servicing file, slap an LNA on it, and go with that, rather than going through the process of locating the custodian who held the original note, filing the paperwork required to have it released to WaMu, etc. Based on the article, it seems possible to conclude that the original note really was lost, but since WaMu made no effort to find it in the first place, it's a no-brainer to conclude that at least one statement in that LNA was false. (They all say something to the effect that all practicable efforts to locate the original have been made and have failed, and that the affiant has personal knowledge of this.)

What this article does not say is whether DLJ has an original note or not. If DLJ owned the note at the time WaMu, the originator and servicer, tried to foreclose on an LNA, that might be why WaMu didn't have it: DLJ had it and either WaMu didn't try to get it from them or DLJ failed to produce it. If DLJ purchased the loan subsequently, as "non-performing," then either DLJ bought with an LNA (it allowed the sale to go through with only an LNA to evidence the note), or WaMu found some note for DLJ. It really drives me nuts that these news reports bring all this stuff up, and then never really report all the relevant details. My best guess is that DLJ bought a pool of junk loans and accepted an LNA instead of requiring the original note. That's probably why DLJ is having to bring other evidence into court, such as the evidence of its purchase of this pool.

I note for y'all that I have personally executed one or two LNAs in my day, and have therefore had all known hard file folders associated with this loan (the servicing file, the branch's copy, the custodial file, whatever there is), as well as all correspondence with the warehouse bank or custodian or whoever else might have had it brought to my desk, so I could personally root through it all once more before I put my officer's signature on an LNA. In all but one of the LNAs I can remember executing, I had documentation from FedEx or some other shipper that a package had indeed been lost, plus clear documentation in the loan file that this specific note had been included in that specific lost shipment. (My shipping department always put the copy of the airbill in the loan file. Always.) And of course I always had a certified true and correct copy of the note to attach to the affidavit.

I bring all this up because, Lents' self-serving nonsense aside, not only can original notes be lost or damaged, so can car titles and any other piece of paper. (I have a friend who once had to execute over 100 LNAs after a fire in an adjoining office suite triggered the sprinkler system in her post-closing department. Those LNAs were accompanied by copies of sodden bits of semi-readable paper that had been patched together on the copier plate, one at a time.) A financial institution in the business of making mortgage loans has no business routinely losing or damaging original promissory notes, and any institution that does so should be shut down by the federal regulators and I mean that.

But if consumer attorneys want to create a situation in which the simple fact of loss of or irreparable damage to an original note vacates the debt, I can promise you you will not like the consequences of that. If it turns into Total War here, don't ever lose an original cancelled check. You should know that there is actually one fairly respectable reason for doing FC filings with note copies, besides servicer laziness or loan sale screw-ups: taking your original note out of the custodian's vault to send to some local attorney to attach to a court filing creates several more opportunities for it to get lost. If it becomes a requirement that FC can proceed only with the original note in the courtroom, and the presence of an LNA always means dismissal, then the things are going to have to be handled and shipped and received with the same level of security as a million-dollar bearer bond. Like, a Brink's truck and a bonded courier carrying a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. You want to pay the cost of that? No. You don't. But you will.

The problem here, I suspect, is that the jurisdiction in question does not provide for a legitimate way to file with a true and correct certified copy of the original note; the only way servicers can get by without giving up their original notes to the county clerk is by filing an LNA, which at minimum makes them look bad (and involves false statements). I'll leave it to the lawyers to argue about the wisdom of forcing servicers to hand over original notes at the same time they are offered no legal remedy if counsel or clerk or FedEx misplaces it. I am simply observing, once again, that this kind of half-serious half-frivolous objection to a foreclosure action can end up having consequences nobody is going to be happy with.

To return to Bloomberg, though, you will notice that an article that goes on and on at length about the dangers of the secondary market in mortgage loans and originators going out of business and so on has exactly one example, which appears to be of a loan with a note that doesn't seem to have been lost in a loan sale and the originator in question is still in business. Meanwhile, some slick operator for whom $120,000 in legal fees is cheaper than five years of mortgage payments and whose hobby is hanging out at the courthouse is creating a precedent for FC filings in Florida that will no doubt be hailed by so-called consumer advocates as a victory for the little guy.

Lost in all of this is the apparent fact, once again, that WaMu was and probably still is exceptionally sloppy with its handling of original notes; that an outfit like DLJ will apparently buy loans with nothing other than a note copy (and pay premium, too!); and that in the absence of the industry getting serious about confronting its true operating costs and failed "efficiencies," its practices are being "criminalized." Back to Bloomberg:

Borrower advocates, including Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, have seized upon the issue of missing mortgage notes as a way to stem foreclosures.

``The best thing to do is to keep people in their homes and for everybody to take steps necessary to make that happen,'' said Chris Geidner, an attorney in Dann's office. ``These trusts are purchasing these notes, and before they even get the paperwork, they foreclose on people. They become foreclosure machines.''

Joe Lents is not the victim of a "foreclosure machine." He's a deadbeat who has found a way to go five years without making a mortgage payment. He can apparently afford $120,000 in legal fees. But little people who cannot afford the mortgages they have are being convinced to let a lawyer fight their foreclosure on the grounds that the original note wasn't in the courtroom, and all that's going to do is delay the inevitable, add legal fees and even more accrued interest to the deal, and draw this whole horrible unwind of the RE bust out into years and years of hell.

I'm sorry, but AG Dann needs to go after predatory lenders who took advantage of borrowers. If he has evidence that loans were originated with the intent to foreclose--which is predatory by definition--then he should go after that. Intervening to stop a foreclosure because an assignment was filed after the loan purchase is just pandering and grandstanding and wasting resources.

The WaMu problem needs to be taken care of by the OTS: how, I want to know, does anyone pass a safety and soundness examination with a pattern of being unable at any given time to tell you where its notes are? With a pattern of requiring some low-level employee to fill out LNAs with false declarations in them to "save time"? If this isn't a pattern, then what's with all the insinuations in the Bloomberg article that it is? If it is a pattern, it's unsafe and unsound and WaMu's charter should be in danger. This is not the kind of problem you "solve" by challenges to individual FC cases, particularly ones like Lents's--the man by his own admission hasn't made a mortgage payment in five years. He deserves to lose that house, yesterday. I wouldn't go on record defending DLJ's loan purchase due diligence practices here, but DLJ deserves to win.

The rest of us deserve to have this kind of crap prevented, rather than enabled. The regulators and the investment community have to stop putting up with sloppy operations and cavalier attitudes toward document custody. At the risk of repeating myself once more, the true costs of the secondary market in mortgages has to come onto somebody's income statement sooner or later. We are seeing what happens when you claim to have careful operations at the same time you go on a cost-cutting spree to get rid of all that back-room stuff. This problem will not be solved by enriching foreclosure-avoidance attorneys.

I suppose I should end with a nod to this one, which got featured yesterday at The Big Picture and which many of you have also emailed to me. From the Chicago Tribune:

The new buyers of a rundown graystone on the South Side showed up Jan. 9 to look at the house they won at a foreclosure auction. They took the plywood off the front door and went inside to make sure the utilities had been shut off. Then they called the police.

Sitting upright in the corner of a bedroom off the kitchen was a human skeleton in a red tracksuit. Next to him lay a dead dog. Neighbors told police the corpse was almost certainly Randy Johnson, a middle-age man who lived alone in the North Kenwood house.

The cause of Johnson's death has not yet been determined, but it is just one of the mysteries about 4578 S. Oakenwald Ave. Somehow, Johnson's house was transferred three times to new owners without anyone noticing he was inside. It's a story involving forged deeds, a corrupt title company and a South Side family that has been under investigation for mortgage fraud.

Keep reading, and you'll find that Countrywide made a 100% financing deal on this thing, either without requiring an appraisal with a physical inspection, or by having relied on a fraudulent appraisal made by an appraiser who never entered the premises, or that corpse wasn't there until after the loan was made. You really can't conclude anything with the evidence we've been given. I confess I'm a bit more startled by this part:

When Johnson hadn't appeared outside for weeks in early 2006, neighbors called the city's non-emergency number asking for well-being checks, fearing he might have had an accident. Firefighters broke down the front door and searched but didn't locate Johnson. His death remains under investigation.

Sure, the thing is worth a few bad jokes at Countrywide's expense, but honestly. If the fire department broke in and searched and didn't find a corpse in 2006, nearly a year before the CFC mortgage was made, you have to wonder when the corpse got put there. As there is evidence that the 2007 purchase with the CFC loan was entirely fraudulent, there's certainly reason to suspect that the body was hidden in the home after the loan was made and the conspirators skipped out with the money. Until we get more information, I'm not inclined to see this as "three transfers without anyone noticing."

But consider it useful evidence that the mortgage mess has gotten bad enough that absolutely any insinuation against lenders, especially Countrywide, is now considered plausible. I'm personally a bit more concerned that certain parties have figured out that foreclosed properties are great places to hide corpses in. Those green pools may not end up being the neighbors' biggest complaint . . .