"Bringing a Wealth of Justice to Those Who Have Neither"
With all of the money the Jim Jones Banks have been throwing at the media, sports teams and mouth pieces, you'd think when one little lady is throwing a monkey wrench in the works they'd have something to say.
But one lady's got em speechless - EF Hutton style - And all she's got to say is "Where's the Note?"
Attorney April Charney. Listen to her yourself:
"You ever look into a place where snakes hang out?" she asks in the middle of a conversation about the loan officers, appraisers, investment bankers, attorneys and others that she believes are responsible for the nation’s worsening financial crisis. "That’s what I see here. They’re writhing and oozing and morphing into creepy stuff with slime all over it." Then in her quiet, gentle drawl...she leans forward and says quite earnestly, "Not to discredit snakes or anything."
Industry says....crickets...
First, because of the way mortgages have been securitized, it’s often unclear who actually owns the debt, she said. "What we see is that systematically, the originating lenders only pledged these loans and didn’t actually transfer them" to the trusts that are supposed to hold them and issue the securities, she explained.
But only the true debt owner has the legal standing to be a plaintiff in a foreclosure, she continued. "That’s first-year law school stuff. If you’re Joe and the debt doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to Marjorie, then Marjorie better be in court, not Joe. Don’t come in as Joe and tell me you have the right to be there when you know full well you don’t."
She tells those swollen Banks, crap Brokers and mis-Trusts they can't have those houses they pretended to pay for and the Industry says...nada...
The Mortgage Bankers Association...represents 2,400 companies from all sectors of real estate finance, did not respond to msnbc.com’s invitation to comment about Charney and her sweeping indictment of the industry and its business practices. And the American Bankers Association...unfamiliar with her work, had no comment.
Unfamiliar with her work? Since, when has that stopped them from using the media to bash someone?
There is nothing more attractive than a smart and tough woman kicking ass and taking names. She sounds like a great prospect for office in Flo-rida.
Oh, there was one brave analyst who actually had something to say to the Banks about April's head on legal approach: "You're screwed"
Bert Ely,(see above) a longtime analyst... and a scholar at the...Cato Institute...said lenders may detest tactics like the ones Charney employs, but "this is well-established in bankruptcy practice, that you have to properly perfect the security interest, and if you haven’t, you’re screwed. ... Debtors’ lawyers immediately start looking for flaws in how the debt is protected. Creditor attorneys always worry about this."
Yeah, I'll bet they do. Except, as Charney points out - the homeowners gotta deal with umpteen different creditors who claim to own their mortgage, when not one of them can produce the note. And the originating bank won't produce the note because, that would expose them to securities law violations for not transferring the loan when they were supposed to, if they ever did it at all.
Innocent Victims abound...
But not everyone who found his or her way to Legal Aid was a victim of housing fever. The economic meltdown pulled some people into foreclosure who never should have been there to begin with. Debra Lou Bridges paid her mortgage on time. If she ever was late,she says, it was never by more than 30 days. But four years ago, for reasons that remain a mystery to her, she received her first foreclosure notice. Bridges still hasn’t been able to determine why she received it. Wells Fargo, the bank that serviced the loan for Fannie Mae, has never shown Bridges documentation of any delinquency. And the cancelled checks from her bank show that Wells Fargo deposited all her checks. But she hasn’t been able to persuade either Wells Fargo or Fannie Mae to discuss the matter or accept her application for loan modification.
This is a segment from a previous diary.