The rise and fall of a foreclosure king

The rise and fall of a foreclosure king

 

By MICHELLE CONLIN
AP Business Writer

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.

Employee depositions paint a picture of a firm under constant pressure from the banks to move faster. The longer it took to foreclose, the more money the banks stood to lose. Like so many in the industry, Stern had a strategy to cope with all the volume and velocity: robo-signing. One employee testified that Stern's chief lieutenant, a one-time file clerk named Cheryl Samons who rose to become the firm's chief operating officer, signed as many as 1,000 foreclosure affidavits a day without reading a single word. The employee said Samons' hand got so tired that she told three other employees to forge her signature. Samons also signed numerous mortgage assignments with a notary stamp that didn't even exist at the time of signing. Notary stamps are only valid for four years.

The only way Samons could have signed mortgage assignments at the time they were supposedly notarized was if she had been capable of time travel.

Read the article