Elliott
Elite Member
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2002
- Professional Status
- Certified General Appraiser
- State
- Oregon
Jeremy Bagott 12/27/24 email:
"WANTED: PERJURERS, EMBEZZLERS FOR IMMEDIATE POSITIONS ASSISTING HUD
VENTURA, Calif. (Dec. 27, 2024) – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been promoting crooks – white-collar criminals, perjurers and others – to become so-called “fair-housing testers.” By all accounts, the effort has succeeded, enabling an unknown number of malicious shakedowns of innocent individuals and companies.
Under former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge – now a lobbyist – the agency initiated a federal rulemaking in 2023 to allow convicted perjurers and white-collar criminals to receive federal grant money to set up dubious sting operations directed at real estate professionals and housing providers. You can see the rulemaking here.
The effort has already paid off for two fraudsters. Both were convicted in federal court while working at the Chatham County Housing Authority in North Carolina. They can continue to hold key positions at the federally funded nonprofit. Central Piedmont Community Action Inc. assists people in Chatham, Durham, Orange and other counties with services that include a federally funded housing program.
Other white-collar criminals, particularly those pardoned by President Joe Biden on December 12, might consider signing on with HUD, which last year awarded $54 million for “discrimination testing.” The stings are based on hunches and rely on trust that the former fraudsters and perjurers will act in good faith and show sound judgment.
Consider the following upstanding citizens. All received recent presidential pardons. All could receive HUD grants to work undercover, even without the pardons. The only requirement: Don’t be in jail.
• Jimmy Dimora, a former Cuyahoga County, Ohio, commissioner. Prosecutors said he orchestrated an extensive pay-to-play scheme alongside a longtime political ally, former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo, who died in 2022. Together, they collected about $450,000 in bribes from contractors. These included gambling trips to Las Vegas and Canada, prostitutes and even a stone-fired pizza oven. Dimora was originally sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2012.
• Paul Daugerdas, a former law partner from Illinois. He was convicted of overseeing fraudulent tax shelters at a cost to the government of more than $1.63 billion. The scheme generated over $7 billion of fraudulent deductions, according to prosecutors, who called Daugerdas “the most prolific, pernicious and utterly unrepentant tax cheat in United States history.” He was originally sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2014.
• Elaine Lovett, the former owner of a Wayne County, Michigan, medical billing company. She was convicted in 2017 for her role in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud Medicare using false billing claims. Her $26 million scheme involved 20 Detroit-area doctors and health care workers, according to federal prosecutors. Her firm billed Medicare for services that were never provided. She also obstructed the government’s probe. Lovett was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered by the federal District judge in the case to pay more than $9 million in restitution.
• Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, Illinois. She defrauded the city for over $50 million from 1983 to 2012. She was fired after the discovery of the embezzlement. She used the city funds to support a horse breeding operation, as well as a lavish lifestyle away from work. Her embezzlement was described as the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. She was sentenced to over 19 years in prison.
As many as 1,000 state-licensed real property appraisers are believed to be under yearslong investigation by HUD in hoax discrimination cases. In the case of appraisers, they are being blamed for simply doing their jobs, which occasionally involves delivering an opinion of value that torpedoes a real estate deal. These unfortunate individuals simply rendered opinions of real estate value that were not sufficient to make deals pencil and, as a result, drew false discrimination complaints and investigations by HUD. The message to all appraisers was clear: if they wished to avoid trouble, they should go along with the contract price in a sale or the value required to make a refinance pencil.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in HUD grant funds and free advertising have been funneled to crony nonprofits and politically aligned law firms, allowing them to continue to harass appraisers through nuisance lawsuits. HUD has been flush with cash from funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Many of these programs were instigated by former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, who has since scurried away from the Biden ship to become a Washington lobbyist.
Efforts by the White House, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and HUD to gut time-tested mortgage underwriting standards over the past four years have led to historic housing inflation and hundreds of thousands of new zombie mortgages. Homes secured by non-performing loans are being kept from repricing in dishonest federal mortgage workout schemes.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott is a real estate appraiser and former newspaperman. His most recent book, “The Ichthyologist’s Guide to the Subprime Meltdown,” is a concise almanac that distills the cataclysmic financial crisis of 2007-2008 to its essence. This pithy guide to the upheaval includes essays, chronologies, roundups and key lists, weaving together the stories of the politics-infused Freddie and Fannie; the doomed Wall Street investment banks Lehman and Bear Stearns; the dereliction of duty by the Big Three credit-rating services; the mayhem caused by the shadowy nonbank lenders; and the massive government bailouts. It provides a rapid-fire succession of “ah-hah” moments as it lays out the meltdown, convulsion by convulsion."
..........................
As Bob Dylan said in "Subterranean Homesick Blues,"
'Look out kid, you're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters, six-time users
Hanging 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool's looking for a new fool
Don't follow leaders, a-watch the parking meter'
"WANTED: PERJURERS, EMBEZZLERS FOR IMMEDIATE POSITIONS ASSISTING HUD
VENTURA, Calif. (Dec. 27, 2024) – The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been promoting crooks – white-collar criminals, perjurers and others – to become so-called “fair-housing testers.” By all accounts, the effort has succeeded, enabling an unknown number of malicious shakedowns of innocent individuals and companies.
Under former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge – now a lobbyist – the agency initiated a federal rulemaking in 2023 to allow convicted perjurers and white-collar criminals to receive federal grant money to set up dubious sting operations directed at real estate professionals and housing providers. You can see the rulemaking here.
The effort has already paid off for two fraudsters. Both were convicted in federal court while working at the Chatham County Housing Authority in North Carolina. They can continue to hold key positions at the federally funded nonprofit. Central Piedmont Community Action Inc. assists people in Chatham, Durham, Orange and other counties with services that include a federally funded housing program.
Other white-collar criminals, particularly those pardoned by President Joe Biden on December 12, might consider signing on with HUD, which last year awarded $54 million for “discrimination testing.” The stings are based on hunches and rely on trust that the former fraudsters and perjurers will act in good faith and show sound judgment.
Consider the following upstanding citizens. All received recent presidential pardons. All could receive HUD grants to work undercover, even without the pardons. The only requirement: Don’t be in jail.
• Jimmy Dimora, a former Cuyahoga County, Ohio, commissioner. Prosecutors said he orchestrated an extensive pay-to-play scheme alongside a longtime political ally, former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo, who died in 2022. Together, they collected about $450,000 in bribes from contractors. These included gambling trips to Las Vegas and Canada, prostitutes and even a stone-fired pizza oven. Dimora was originally sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2012.
• Paul Daugerdas, a former law partner from Illinois. He was convicted of overseeing fraudulent tax shelters at a cost to the government of more than $1.63 billion. The scheme generated over $7 billion of fraudulent deductions, according to prosecutors, who called Daugerdas “the most prolific, pernicious and utterly unrepentant tax cheat in United States history.” He was originally sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2014.
• Elaine Lovett, the former owner of a Wayne County, Michigan, medical billing company. She was convicted in 2017 for her role in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud Medicare using false billing claims. Her $26 million scheme involved 20 Detroit-area doctors and health care workers, according to federal prosecutors. Her firm billed Medicare for services that were never provided. She also obstructed the government’s probe. Lovett was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered by the federal District judge in the case to pay more than $9 million in restitution.
• Rita Crundwell, the former comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, Illinois. She defrauded the city for over $50 million from 1983 to 2012. She was fired after the discovery of the embezzlement. She used the city funds to support a horse breeding operation, as well as a lavish lifestyle away from work. Her embezzlement was described as the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history. She was sentenced to over 19 years in prison.
As many as 1,000 state-licensed real property appraisers are believed to be under yearslong investigation by HUD in hoax discrimination cases. In the case of appraisers, they are being blamed for simply doing their jobs, which occasionally involves delivering an opinion of value that torpedoes a real estate deal. These unfortunate individuals simply rendered opinions of real estate value that were not sufficient to make deals pencil and, as a result, drew false discrimination complaints and investigations by HUD. The message to all appraisers was clear: if they wished to avoid trouble, they should go along with the contract price in a sale or the value required to make a refinance pencil.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in HUD grant funds and free advertising have been funneled to crony nonprofits and politically aligned law firms, allowing them to continue to harass appraisers through nuisance lawsuits. HUD has been flush with cash from funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Many of these programs were instigated by former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, who has since scurried away from the Biden ship to become a Washington lobbyist.
Efforts by the White House, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and HUD to gut time-tested mortgage underwriting standards over the past four years have led to historic housing inflation and hundreds of thousands of new zombie mortgages. Homes secured by non-performing loans are being kept from repricing in dishonest federal mortgage workout schemes.
# # #
Jeremy Bagott is a real estate appraiser and former newspaperman. His most recent book, “The Ichthyologist’s Guide to the Subprime Meltdown,” is a concise almanac that distills the cataclysmic financial crisis of 2007-2008 to its essence. This pithy guide to the upheaval includes essays, chronologies, roundups and key lists, weaving together the stories of the politics-infused Freddie and Fannie; the doomed Wall Street investment banks Lehman and Bear Stearns; the dereliction of duty by the Big Three credit-rating services; the mayhem caused by the shadowy nonbank lenders; and the massive government bailouts. It provides a rapid-fire succession of “ah-hah” moments as it lays out the meltdown, convulsion by convulsion."
..........................
As Bob Dylan said in "Subterranean Homesick Blues,"
'Look out kid, you're gonna get hit
By losers, cheaters, six-time users
Hanging 'round the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool's looking for a new fool
Don't follow leaders, a-watch the parking meter'
