When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.
The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.
The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn't the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.
Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers ...
In July, the Beckers won a David-and-Goliath struggle when Goldman subsidiary MTGLQ Investors dropped its bid to seize their house. By then, the college-educated couple had been reduced to shopping for canned goods at flea markets and selling used ceramic glass. [like millions of others, but no matter]
Theirs is an infrequent happy ending among the hundreds of cases in which subsidiaries of Goldman, better known for sending top officers such as Paulson to serve in high-level Washington posts, have sought to contain bondholder losses by foreclosing on properties and evicting delinquent borrowers.
Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment on individual cases or on the firm's new role in bankruptcy courts.
Since the source is a Florida paper, where's Grayson on "show me the note," anyhow?
NOTE Here's a Show Me The Note site, and a process to follow. No, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
NOTE Via Jr Deputy Accountant. Why should anyone care whether the couple were "responsible" or not? Have our betters owned up to their own fraud? Otherwise, since they're in "Take what you can get" mode, why not everyone else? Especially since the likelihood of fraud implies that the banksters are likely to cave.
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Not A Simple Case
This is an outlier because the couple had separate investments with Goldman and, under California law, wanted to offset their mortgage by their losses on those investments. To avoid that, Goldman had denied owning the note.
This isn't a simple "can't find the mortgage paperwork" case, pursuing this case would have exposed Goldman to punitive damages in the state case to offset the mortgage.
Goldman really is totally corrupt. At some point a law firm specializing in class action suits is going to be made extremely wealthy by this kind of garbage.
If Grayson was a member of the California bar, he would love this case. Goldman denied owning the mortgage for three years when it would have cost them money, and then claimed to own it in order to foreclose.
The worst part of this mess is that there is no good or simple way of knowing who actually does hold the mortgage on the property. This goes to the whole complaint about people being responsible - if they don't demand that the note be presented in court, they could have their home foreclosed by one company, and then be sued later by the company that does actually have the mortgage. That has happened because of the way mortgages have been handled by the financial mafia.