A spokeswoman for OneWest Bank acknowledged that an official, confronted with a ream of foreclosure papers, had mistakenly signed for two different banks — just as the Deutsche Bank official did. Deutsche Bank, which declined to let an attorney speak on the record about any of its cases before Justice Schack, e-mailed a PDF of a three-page pamphlet in which it claimed little responsibility for foreclosures, even though the bank’s name is affixed to tens of thousands of such motions. The bank described itself as simply a trustee for investors.
Justice Schack came to his recent prominence by a circuitous path, having worked for 14 years as public school teacher in Brooklyn. He was a union representative and once walked a picket line with his wife, Dilia, who was a teacher, too. All was well until the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
“Why’d I go to law school?” he said. “Thank Mayor Abe Beame, who froze teacher salaries.”
He was counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association in the 1980s and ’90s, when it was on a long winning streak against team owners. “It was the millionaires versus the billionaires,” he says. “After a while, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘He’s making $4 million, he’s making $5 million, and I’m worth about $1.98.’ ”
So he dived into a judicial race. He was elected to the Civil Court in 1998 and to the Supreme Court for Brooklyn and Staten Island in 2003. His wife is a Democratic district leader; their daughter, Elaine, is a lawyer and their son, Douglas, a police officer.
Justice Schack’s duels with the banks started in 2007 as foreclosures spiked sharply. He saw a plague falling on Brooklyn, particularly its working-class black precincts. “Banks had given out loans structured to fail,” he said.
The judge burrowed into property record databases. He found banks without clear title, and a giant foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, representing two sides in a dispute. He noted that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, made more than $11 million in 2007 while the company’s total returns fell 12 percent.
“Maybe,” he advised the bank, “counsel should wonder, like the court, if Mr. Stumpf was unjustly enriched at the expense of W.F.’s stockholders.”
He was, how to say it, mildly appalled.
“I’m a guy from the streets of Brooklyn who happens to become a judge,” he said. “I see a bank giving a $500,000 mortgage on a building worth $300,000 and the interest rate is 20 percent and I ask questions, what can I tell you?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31judge.html?pagewanted=1&hpw
There is a financial term for the written law of both parties having to put up equal value of collateral of some sort when entering a contract for a home loan (cannot remember the term at the moment). For the potential homeowner it is the home that becomes the worthy collateral sufficient to meet this criteria for the loan. The bank, however, says it is loaning you money for the purchase of the home, is actually carrying the loan, but they are not actually putting up sufficient funds to represent a valid contract due to our fractional reserve system that requires banks to only have to hold 10%.
there is a precedent case where a man fought his foreclosure notice based upon the bank's failing to put up sufficient funds to honor the loan contract, and he won... It is too bad that this is not used much more than it is...
Good Greetings All:
I believe this Human Angel of a Judge is creating a legal precedence for more Home Owners to Embrace and Empower themselves against this machine that is starting to grind to a halt. It is time for inequity to be returned to the light to be transmuted for the Highest Good of all. The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth.
fairyfarmgirl