“Are there any rules against my sitting in?” Sylvia asked.
At the bench, Judge Doug Little was presiding over a telephone and a cartful of file boxes. Present on speakerphone was an attorney from the Law Offices of David J. Stern, Esq. “Good morning, Your Honor,” the phone squawked, in keeping with the solemnity of the proceedings. As the rocket docket got going, Sylvia began taking notes. The original mortgage document was often missing from the file, and the judge would tell the lawyer on the line to get it in by the end of the week. In some cases the entire file was missing. Several defendants showed up or had a lawyer represent them. There was Michael Mcrae, who had lived in his house for eighteen years, with two sons and a new job, and who was trying to refinance the loan (the judge extended the sale date). There was Howard Huff, a black man with little education, who didn’t seem to know where the house in question was located, since he had simply agreed to put his name on a mortgage as an investment vehicle with a broker he knew, and now found himself being sued by the bank. (Sylvia, in distress, ran out after Huff and urged him to contact Legal Aid. Huff looked at her in bewilderment.) But the overwhelming majority of the cases went uncontested. Sylvia knew how it was, how the banks beat them down, lied to them, gave them the runaround, didn’t answer calls, until, by the time their day in court finally came, most defendants had long since given up. Justice was delivered in their absence, in the blink of an eye.
“I spend more time at the McDonald’s drive-through window,” Sylvia said later, “than people who were losing their homes got.” Present in their stead, she felt something different from the stress of her own ordeal, something more like empathy.
Near the end of the morning session, Judge Little suddenly addressed her. “Is there anything you need?”
“Could I have a copy of the docket of cases?”
The judge looked uncertainly to the bailiff. The bailiff firmly shook her head: “The docket is shredded every day.” Later, Sylvia saw the bailiff whisper something about her to one of the court officers.
But by that point in her life, Sylvia was not as easily deterred as she might have appeared. She waited till the end of the day, then asked again for the docket, and this time she received a copy from the judge’s clerk. With the docket, she was able to attach the names of homeowners and banks to the cases that she’d witnessed and jotted down. That night, she wrote up her notes in a report and sent it to a network of Florida lawyers active in foreclosure defense. That was how she became, without pay, their eyes and ears in court. That was how Sylvia Landis joined a movement—the first movement she was ever part of, “a middle-class movement,” she said, of people concerned about law and property rights and transparency and democracy, with all the middle-class naïveté of Americans who had always believed in the system and never fought it in their lives. And that was how she came to know Matt Weidner.
* * *
MATTHEW D. WEIDNER, P.A. ATTORNEY AT LAW, said the sign on the plate glass window. REAL ESTATE CIVIL LITIGATION FAMILY LAW CORPORATE LAW. Basically, Weidner took anything that walked through the door—he was a door lawyer, the subsistence farmer of the legal world, a couple-grand retainer up front. He worked out of a crappy storefront office between a saloon and a bikini bar on a sketchy strip of downtown St. Petersburg, his messy curved desk taking up most of the available floor space. Weidner seemed a little sketchy, too, at first.
He was in his late thirties, Florida-born. An old debit card showed that he’d once been fat, but he got into triathlons and trimmed down, and the wall behind his desk filled up with framed medals beneath his degrees. He was divorced, having left a house with a big mortgage to a wife who didn’t want to sell. He knew the fall was imminent when Hummers started appearing in their subdivision—the arrogance, the absurdity of it all. Weidner himself leased a white Cadillac, his contribution to the U.S. auto industry, with a camouflage survival backpack in the trunk. He had an animated pink face, a bowlegged walk, and a quick throwaway line for every situation he walked into. He would enter Room 400 of the St. Petersburg Judicial Building, his pale blue eyes widening in mock horror at the assortment of dark-suited attorneys present, and announce: “Bunch of thugs in this courtroom.” Once he got going, the sentences rolled out in fluent waves of excitement and indignation. “We’re consuming crap from wherever but we’re not making anything. How are we supposed to make mortgage payments here in the United States when we don’t make anything else? What if we have a brownout or a blackout that’s completely accidental but shuts down New York City or Chicago? How long do you think it’s going to take before absolute panic sets in?” Then, at his hyperbolic height, he took a verbal step back to check himself: “Am I being hysterical?”
Weidner hadn’t always held apocalyptic views about America. He had started life as a Boy Scout in the home of spring break, Daytona Beach. His uncle, Don, was director of the Florida Republican Party when the state was still largely Democratic—under him the party was established in all sixty-seven counties and held its first state convention, in 1979. Matt was suckled at the breast of Ronald Reagan, attended Young Republican events, devoutly believed in God and country, American exceptionalism, self-reliance, and small government. In college, during the Gingrich revolution in Congress, he named his boxer Newt. He was all for invading Iraq—“We’d do a good deed and get a forward operating base of a gas station.” And yet, looking back, he now saw that the rot had already set in with his parents and their generation, in the seventies. Weidner’s grandparents busted their asses after World War II and died with their house paid off—hell, his granddad was still working while his dad, with his reverse mortgage, had been retired and screwing off for a decade. “Our parents were fat and lazy,” he said. “Our grandparents would never have mortgaged everything and lived off the credit. If you look at the gross domestic product in the past twenty years, in particular the last ten years, it’s not off anything we’ve produced. It’s trading on the paper of what was produced thirty years before that.”
Weidner got his law degree from Florida State in 1999, then went to work as a lobbyist for the Florida Academy of Pain Medicine. His job was to fly around the state entertaining doctors and getting drug reps from Pfizer and Novartis to write fifty-thousand-dollar checks at the academy’s annual conference. He would attend meetings in Tallahassee where the room was set up so that the flow of lobbyists proceeded smoothly past the food table to the waiting lawmaker. The moment of truth came with the handshake, when Weidner would lock eyes with the state rep and pull the envelope stuffed with checks from his pocket, and the state rep would palm it, feel its thickness, determine how much time Weidner had to explain why it was important to defeat a law requiring patients to visit a doctor every time they refilled their hydrocodone prescription because moms wouldn’t be able to get cough syrup for their kids—then Weidner would be cut off midsentence, time to move on.
Over time, these events made him physically sick. He would leave the room thinking, “I want to get into an honest profession, like the fucking practice of law.”
In 2001, he began working at his uncle Don’s law office in Jacksonville. On December 12, Weidner was supposed to fly to Fort Lauderdale and back with his uncle, another lawyer, and two clients on Don’s single-engine Piper Cherokee. A last-minute phone call from a judge kept Matt at the office. That evening, in a heavy fog, the plane crashed into a pine swamp near the Jacksonville airport, killing everyone.
With his chilling reprieve, Weidner fled to St. Petersburg, where he set up a one-man practice. For the first few years he didn’t even have a place to sit, would just grab a desk when one of the other lawyers in the storefront office suite was in court. He hustled and scraped by, mostly on divorce cases, until, around 2007, foreclosures started coming in—lots of them. The first cases were from poorer areas like south St. Pete. Then middle-class professionals showed up. It was carnage, but all in the shadows, because no one wanted to talk about it—shamefaced men who could hardly bring themselves to tel
l Weidner about the mortgage modification scam they’d fallen for. Couples sat down and lit into each other, the wife blaming the husband for losing his job, the husband blaming the wife for wanting a big house, until Weidner stopped them: “Hey, guys, it’s us against them now, and it doesn’t matter what happened, we’ve got to stick together.” He would walk around to their side of the curved desk and roll up an empty chair between them: “I want you guys to focus on the impact this has on the kids.”
Some clients came in the first time saying, “I’m not losing my home no matter what it takes,” and Weidner told them, “I’m your guy. I’m going to fight for you.” Through most of 2008 and 2009 he assumed that the government and the banks would work something out—split the defaulted loans, the Treasury paying the banks half the value, the banks writing off the other half as bad debt, the mortgages now belonging to the feds, who would start over with the homeowners and keep them in their houses. Something like the bank bailout—just evaporate all that phantom debt, which would never be paid off in the whole history of the world. But there was no bailout for homeowners. His clients would spend pointless months trying to get someone at the bank on the phone to agree to a short sale or loan modification, finally growing tired and coming back to Weidner: “I’m ready to go. Mom’s got a place I can live at,” or “We’re going to rent somewhere downtown.”
Weidner would tell them, “I’ve never lost a foreclosure case.” It was true. Zero. Not because he was that good, though clients found him to be a fearless advocate. It was because the system was that bad.
Weidner found that as soon as he offered any resistance, the bank’s case started to crumble. The original note was lost. A title search couldn’t establish continuous chain of custody. The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems had replaced the good old physical document at the recorder’s office in the county courthouse with a digital facsimile, which, under Florida law, shouldn’t qualify. The paperwork bore a fraudulent signature, a phony date, a bogus seal. No one noticed any of this while the economy chugged along, but as soon as things went into the toilet and people stopped being able to pay, America’s mortgages turned out to be a hoax. A client named Arlene Fuino, a real estate agent and “short sale and foreclosure resource,” was being sued for default by “U.S. Bank National Association, as Trustee for Structured Asset Securities Corporation Trust 2006-WF2.” What the hell was that? Weidner took the case to a Sixth Circuit judge and demanded that the plaintiff’s attorney show capacity: “All we’re asking is for them to identify who is the entity that is asking my client to give them a couple hundred thousand dollars.” Basically, Wall Street (“Gotham,” he called it, “the anus, the black hole of the country, sucking all the money up there, the core of the apocalypse”) had sliced and packaged the mortgages so many times through securitization, and then the banks had cut so many corners trying to recover the bad loans, that no institution could establish a clear right to someone’s house. Which didn’t stop the sheriff’s deputies from banging on the door.
Weidner had never doubted the soundness of the courts, and he was staggered by the implications: “Our entire system of property ownership is in chaos and turmoil.”
One day, he was sitting in Room 300 of the St. Petersburg Judicial Building, waiting for his case to come up, when a plaintiff’s attorney in another foreclosure case informed the judge that she wasn’t the plaintiff’s attorney after all. She had been hired by a computer at a gigantic foreclosure mill called Lender Processing Services to represent Wells Fargo, but it turned out that Wells Fargo was not the holder of the note—U.S. Bank was—at least, that was what she thought. Judge Pamela Campbell told her to get it straightened out. When Weidner’s case was called, he stood up on the courtroom’s pale green carpet and said, “Your Honor, my head is about to explode because of what we just heard in the last case.”
Judge Campbell smiled wanly. “Hopefully they’ll figure out who the proper plaintiff is.”
The judges heard Weidner’s arguments, and the judges issued stays on foreclosure sales. But the judges refused to grant his motions to dismiss—because, after all, his clients owed money. So the cases languished in purgatory year after year, as the mortgages went unpaid, the courts remained clogged, the banks rejected applications to modify loans, and the clients got no resolution. But at least they stayed in their homes.
There was, for example, Jack Hamersma. When Jack first walked through Weidner’s door, he was a burly boat salesman, a man’s man, who had once owned a collision shop and had also done some house flipping. He was just past fifty and owed six hundred thousand dollars on two loans on his house in St. Pete—a ridiculous amount, because by the time Jack retained Weidner, it was worth maybe half that. Jack wanted his lawyer and anyone who would listen to know that he had worked all his life, had been able to afford the house when he bought it. Once Weidner got involved, the banks couldn’t put the first piece of paper together, and the suit dragged on for years, during which Jack lost his job with the boat company, his savings dwindled, and he came down with three types of cancer—colorectal, liver, and lymph. That happened to a lot of Weidner’s clients—the job, the house, their health, usually in that order. Weidner watched Jack shrink before his eyes, dropping a hundred pounds, until, three years after that first consultation, he limped into the office one afternoon to discuss his case, wasted legs sticking out of his shorts, a canvas bag hanging over his shoulder, from which a drip tube extended under a bandage on his chest. He had just come from five hours of chemo and was at the start of forty-eight hours of pumping.
“I find that a lot of my clients are sick,” Weidner told Jack after inviting him to sit down. “I don’t know what the connection is. Do you know?”
“The stress level is obviously high,” Jack said, in a voice that sounded clotted. From the neck up there were still traces of rugged good looks. “When you can’t work, you have no income over a period of years, then it does bad things to you. You run out of money—it’s nothing intentional, you just can’t pay them.”
“You’re one of the guys that’s been hanging around the longest,” Weidner said.
“It’s going to outlive me.”
“Don’t give up yet.” It didn’t take much to set Weidner off, and Jack’s presence was enough. “We want to do our task, our vocation, we want to provide, and I’m just so fucking furious that our government has ripped away our ability to provide anything.”
“I don’t know if it’s up to the government to create jobs,” Jack said, “but it’s up to them to help the situation. When I applied for some kind of aid they looked at me like I had three heads.” Jack was pretty much broke, which disqualified him from the government’s emergency homeowners’ program. His treatment was costing thirty-five thousand a month, and if Medicaid rejected his application, the treatment would end. “I’m in this little tiny corner and I can’t find my way out. Something is going to collapse sooner or later.”
“They didn’t give my mom any longer than they gave you, and she’s still kicking.”
“I’d like to think I can beat it. From an attitude perspective, I think I can—on the spiritual side. But on the clinical side, no, it’s inoperable. The statistics say you live two years with what I’ve got.”
The conversation turned to Jack’s case. It seemed to have gone moribund. “I have not heard anything from Bank of America in probably a year,” Jack said. “I get an occasional little FedExgram from Wells Fargo telling me that if I pay them a hundred and eighty-three thousand dollars today they will wipe it off.”
“So if you receive it today and they receive it tomorrow—”
“Technically it’s too late.” Jack managed a little laugh. “I’m not going to stir the pot.”
“Let sleeping dogs lie.” Weidner was getting riled up again. How the fuck could fifty trillion dollars of debt in the United States ever be paid off? “It gets to that level of abstraction where the only people that are fucking paying anymore—why should you pay? This
whole debt thing, we’re just feeding this monster that, if everyone just stopped, then they’d really be in a fix.”
“I don’t pay anyone anymore,” Jack said. “I can’t, I have no way to.” When somebody tried to serve him with a summons on his Home Depot card, he didn’t answer the door.
“The only thing that is even remotely possible is massive worldwide debt repudiation,” Weidner said. “It all gets fucking burned up, because, if not, your son works for his entire life and never accumulates anything, because he is busy paying off personal debt and government debt and institutional debt.”
“From my side, I can’t do anything about anything, so what do you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Which isn’t my frame of mind, it’s not my character, it’s not my makeup, but I’m pushed into that corner to the point that I have no options left.”
It was a mystery to Weidner why the banks didn’t aggressively pursue Jack’s house, which was still worth some money, but went after others tooth and nail. It seemed totally random, which was even scarier than the other scenarios—that the banks wanted to keep the debt on their books as assets to show their stockholders, or that they were getting perverse financial incentives, or that they actually thought the market was going to bounce back sometime soon. The other thing Weidner couldn’t understand was why all the unemployed homeowners in foreclosure across the country didn’t come together in a mass movement. He asked Jack about that, and Jack had an answer.
“It cuts you off from everything. Imagine getting up every day and not having a purpose. You’re not working, your self-worth goes down the toilet. You don’t interact with people. You stay in your house. You don’t want to answer the phone. It isolates you. I can’t even go out to get a bite to eat. I don’t want to spend fifteen dollars.”
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