It has to be true that what we don't do, we don't know. At any rate, having never had reason to have, much less use, a fake ID (I've only ever been stopped and asked for my driver's license once in my 58 years of driving and then it was a bogus stop by a cop, who thought out-of-state plates = drug dealer), the whole birth certificate and voter ID kerfuffle has been a puzzlement. But now, having tried to run down the ownership of real estate in Georgia, it's occurred to me that the people, who relied on fake IDs in high school to buy liquor and cigarettes, now use that same strategy to conduct mostly sham business enterprises. For Georgians, Florida seems a favorite place to get chartered. Indeed, there are services on the internet that will file all the paper-work for a fee. Guess that's how Limited Liability Companies resident in P.O. Boxes qualify as owners of property.
Maybe because they know that failure to pay the tax man can result in properties being lost, the assessor's records tend to be more accurate than those of the Secretary of State. So, for example, we've got Mary Wan and Gascoigne apparently cohabiting on 14th Street in Atlanta.
That a Mr. Stephen F. Been is behind both these projects doesn't really come as a surprise. He's a graduate of the Frederica Academy, after all, and these developments are in the neighborhood. Mr. Been has just returned to his old stomping grounds, so to speak. But, why he's intent on trashing the place is a mystery.
Perhaps trashing is too harsh a word to apply to what's already been done to the old Sea Island plant nursery. According to Google maps, it was still growing stuff in 2013.
But trashing is what I think strip mining does to the environment. Here's what it looks like now from on the ground.
The highest elevation on that lot was 9' above sea level. Which is why it is in a hurricane hazard zone. Now that they've mined the highest point, presumably to sell the sand, the whole parcel is even more likely to flood during a normal rain, never mind a hurricane.
Why would someone do that? It's a good question. Maybe it's just a matter of attitude. If history is prologue, this story out of Atlanta, where the Beens, father and son, were active as the Legacy Communities Group is revealing.
From 2005 through 2007, Tampa Financial and Legacy Communities executed agreements guaranteeing the indebtedness to the bank. In 2007, when the liquid assets securing the debt were transferred to “SRB” Investment and “SFB” Investment, the bank required three additional guarantors: SRB Investment, SFB Investment and the affiliated companies’ operating entity, Legacy Communities Group, Inc.
Note the Florida connection and the fake IDs -- aka "affiliated companies." Affiliated, as in "all in the family?" The Georgia version of family values, which is, of course, very different from the Chicago or New Jersey family.
Then, the housing market began to collapse. And in 2008, the Beens authorized so-called “partnership distributions” from SRB and SFB. From June 30 to Dec. 31, 2008, SRB’s and SFB’s collective assets shrank by $191 million or nearly 90 percent, from $216 million to $25 million, according to financial statements. This left the guarantors in violation of the liquidity covenants.
I'm not sure that "began to collapse" is an accurate representation. Imagine having built a house of cards and then pulling, one after the other, out. Collapse is inevitable. Failure by design.
Creditors have some recourse, but not much, since courts can only issue orders and rely on somebody else (presumably a bank) to comply.
“When a money judgment is likely to be uncollectible because a debtor has fraudulently moved its assets in an attempt to dissipate or conceal them from a creditor, Georgia law, both before and under the Georgia (Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act), gives the creditor the right to interlocutory relief by freezing the assets where they are,” he (Justice David Nahmias) wrote for the Court.
Given that $191 million had gone missing, having $21 million frozen was likely cold comfort.
In the 1980s, it was Saving and Loan Associations that got scammed by farm land and subdivision lots being flipped to increase their apparent market value and qualify for ever larger loans. In the 2000s, it was banks that got taken to the cleaners. Apparently, the Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act didn't work real well in Georgia, the state with the highest number of failed banks.
Is it just a coincidence that, in the years between 2006 and 2013, Gascoigne's travel companions included:
Sea Island Company
Shackelford Condominiums
Stewart Atlantic
Columbus Bank and Trust Company
Sea Island Coastal Properties
Sea Island Company as Manager of Sea Island Coastal Properties
Nursery Tract LLC, a Missouri company
First National Bank of St. Louis
Clayton Forsyth Realty LLC
before it arrived on the arm of Gascoigne LLC as "Mariners Landing." And through it all, Surveyor Shupe has certified that everything is on the up and up. Although, he did note on the latest rendition of a preliminary plat that:
"The plat was prepared without the benefit of a title examination."
Of course, hardly anyone does title searches anymore. Most everyone just hands over some dollars to an insurance company that will search the deed books, after the fact, IF anyone has a complaint. That land surface has metes and bounds which can be accurately assessed is a nuisance to those with fraudulent intent. Apparently, they get around it by setting up fake IDs both for themselves and their properties.
Which leads to the question "is that when fraud first surfaces, in high school," or are perennial fraudsters just people who never grow up? Or maybe they hide behind fictitious names 'cause they don't know who they are.
7:49 AM PT: As of Friday, November 14, 2014, the National Bank of St. Louis is now the Central Bank of St. Louis. They call it "rebranding."