Join us as Steve Grumbine, Patrick Lovell, and Eric Vaughan take the audience into the real world experiences of the one and only John O’Brien and Jeff Thigpen, two incredible public servants, men of courage and integrity who are quite probably the only two keepers of land records in America committed to the reliability of these records. These men discovered monumental fraud in the housing bubble and notified everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Eric Holder to the New York Times and Matt Taibbi, but no one came to look. 

But Eric and Patrick did, and they discovered O’Brien had uncovered hundreds of thousands of pieces of documentation fraud emanating from MERS and Robo Signing that led to millions of wrongful foreclosures that were bulldozed by corrupt courts across the country. O’Brien and Thigpen had the courage to do what was right in a world of a whole lot of wrong.   

This episode is monumentally bigger than Deep Throat and Watergate.  Monumentally bigger than Oliver North and Contragate.  It’s even monumentally larger than Trump and the Insurrection that will never be held accountable because we have become that corrupt. 

The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files
S2:E5 – When the Foundation Rots, Systems Collapse
August 1, 2021

 

[00:00:04.520] – John O’Brien [intro/music]

I’ve been threatened 50 million times to be sued by this bank and that bank and everybody else. No one has ever sued me because they don’t want myself or Jeff  Thigpen in a courtroom because we can absolutely prove what these banks and what these lenders did to people’s land records.

[00:00:26.930] – Jeff Thigpen [intro/music]

Your local judges, God bless them, but they don’t know complex financial instruments, and these too big to fail banks knew that, and those tall building law firm attorneys knew that. And so when we got into the process of trying to hold anybody accountable, it all fell apart.

[00:00:52.950] – Eric Vaughan [intro/music]

In a world of elite criminals, only people of elite character can protect our system. This is The New Untouchables.

[00:01:03.280] – Patrick Lovell

So welcome back to season two of The New Untouchables, and it’s my great pleasure to introduce two heroes. And for those of you who are out there listening that found your way to this podcast. Many of you out there, particularly that have gone through the foreclosure crisis have heard of the heroic efforts of John O’Brien and Jeff Thigpen.

These two gentlemen are voices that are profoundly important to the truth and the essence of this story in a way that few are. Now I’m going to create some immediate introductions here and then I’ll launch into the questions. But John O’Brien, let me introduce you to Steve Grumbine. Steve Grumbine is pretty much the pillar of this podcast.

John O’Brien is coming to us from Massachusetts. Jeff Thigpen is coming to us from North Carolina. And both John and Jeff, you can see here, I’m joined also in addition to Steve by my colleague Eric Vaughan. So we come back to you after, unfortunately, a three-year hiatus from the last time we got a chance to visit with you. And one thing I want to let our viewers understand off the top is as you unpack this incredible story, you get all of these different features that give you a sense of the whole, and the whole is a gigantic criminal enterprise.

It’s a criminal enterprise that our politicians two weeks ago, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren was asking Jamie Dimon about late fees as opposed to what we’re introducing to you here, a slightly different universe. And on that note, I think I want to start with you, John. John, can you give us a brief introduction of who you are and what you do?

[00:02:43.310] – John O’Brien

I’m the Register of Deeds for the Southern Essex County in Massachusetts, located in Salem, Massachusetts, and as the Register of Deeds, I’m the keeper of the records.

[00:02:52.560] – Lovell

And can you tell us the significance of Southern Essex of Massachusetts by way of this incredible, important position?

[00:03:02.190] – O’Brien

We house the oldest continuous land records in the United States of America. And as Jeff will tell you, too, the Registries of Deeds are the backbone of this country, the land recordation system. It was put in place so that people at any time could look and see exactly what was on their property, property records, mortgage, deeds, liens, attachments, whatever.

And it was an honest view. And it’s funny, we have a sign when you come into the registry, it says, “The deeds tell the story.” And now I tell people, “But sadly, it’s not a true story anymore because of the corruption and the fraud and everything else that the banks and Wall Street did to the recordation system in this country.” And it’s just devastating.

And every day I walk into that registry. We have a Fraud Museum where we house 39,000+ fraudulent documents that we came across and there’s at least another 100,000 in another building, but, of course, I couldn’t get anybody to fund an audit or anything else, God forbid, you want to expose this kind of stuff. And when you look at those records, people have chains of titles that have fraudulent documents.

There’s absolutely no question about it. And as I’ve tried to tell people, I’ve been threatened 50 million times to be sued by this bank and that bank and everybody else. No one has ever sued me because they don’t want myself or Jeff Thigpen, because we’re really the only two Registers of Deeds, I think, in the United States that care about this or exposed it in a courtroom because we can absolutely prove what these banks and what these lenders did to people’s land records.

And to some people, it might not be important, but to me, it’s very, very important that the accuracy and the integrity of those records are maintained every single day. And I can’t honestly look anyone in the eye that comes into my registry and tell them that the records on their property are honest, and that’s very, very sad.

[00:05:26.580] – Lovell

Mr. O’Brien, I’m going to come back to you in just a moment and we’re going to delve deeply into your story, which is extraordinary, as is Jeff Thigpen’s. Jeff, could you please introduce yourself and please tell us a little bit about who you are?

[00:05:41.060] – Jeff Thigpen

Yeah, I’m Jeff Thigpen, the Guilford County Register of Deeds in Greensboro- Highpoint, North Carolina. John is spot on. So much of what we do is simple. It’s the idea that we know who owns what, that people are who they say they are, and when they do those two things right, we have transparency, plainness, and fair dealing. It aids commerce and democracy and the rule of law.

It helps a system in the United States that we have said that we try to help our communities be healthy. That helps us in creating opportunity and rules of the road and certainty and transparency and plainness and fair dealing. John O’Brien and I are not some radical, crazy guys. We are two people who believe deeply in the oath of office we take. We believe deeply in the records that come to us every single day.

We all have local communities of “dirt lawyers” and people locally who are trying to help, for example, families obtain what sometimes they believe is a dream of homeownership, of things in many ways that are admirable. And I think what we both discovered over the course of the years that we worked together and looking at how the Register of Deeds offices are a part of a larger complex set of forces in our economy and our financial system that has in many ways been knocked off the rails.

[00:07:17.180] – Lovell

Yes, sir.

[00:07:17.590] – Thigpen

And so I think that when we look at what happened leading up to the financial crisis and how laws were changed and how regulatory entities weren’t doing their jobs and how elected officials were getting campaign dollars to really basically not address this. And then based on what y’all have done in The Con, in really helping uncover that cloud of witnesses, those people who stood against that grain, and when nobody was listening, John O’Brien in Massachusetts was listening.

And as a fellow register, as someone who was having some very lonely and painful nights discovering all this, I found someone like John in Massachusetts that was a model for me. And so I’m glad to be here, and I’m glad to be here with John and appreciate the work that you all are doing.

[00:08:10.100] – Lovell

Well, thank you. What came to mind as you were both introducing who you are, the biggest question for me from the very beginning was I understand systems. I understand how things work. I’m not a rocket scientist, but I understand that there’s a way that the Saturn or Apollo missions made their way to the moon and we successfully land on the moon and everything that went into that apparatus to make that happen. We understand. I understand.

We all understand that a plane flies based on the integrity of all of the systems that go into making that possible. Same with the ship. It floats if all of those processes that make that whole have integrity. The same can be said of everything about our – both our political system, but most importantly, the system recordation within the system of integrity to know who owns what for what purpose, because that’s what differentiated us from Mother England.

That was almost the entire purpose of creating the United States to begin with. And of course, we’re all aware of all of the other contradictions that happened afterwards. But on that note, I mean, I find it incredibly profound that John O’Brien literally is a guy that imbues the integrity of the oldest registry of deeds in the United States.

And, John, every time I’ve spoken with you, you’ve been able to convey in such a profound way what that means for you professionally, the dignity of your office, the dignity of what you constitute for the citizenry of Massachusetts. But there’s so much to cover here. Let’s have an overview first and give us a perspective of what you learned. What did you start to see and then what did you do about it and what didn’t happen as a result?

[00:09:50.510] – O’Brien

As I’ve said, when you first interviewed me, I had a woman from my hometown, the city of Lynn, Mass. came into the registry and told us the story and now has been a close personal friend of mine. I thought she was crazy. She’s telling me that the bank doesn’t own my mortgage. This one. That one. And we really didn’t know what she was talking about.

And finally, I said to myself, let’s take this apart. Let’s see what she’s talking about. Well, she actually opened up my eyes and the eyes of hopefully the world to exactly what was taking place. And when that happened, I immediately sent out a letter to the attorney general of Massachusetts at the time, and others, and told them that we’ve got a problem. And I expected to get a phone call instantly saying, “Wow, what’s going on here?” I didn’t. And that’s what troubled me.

It went on for a while. Well, in the meantime, we started to dig and dig and dig and we found, wow, we’ve got fraudulent signatures. We’ve got people that are one minute a vice president of the bank, the next minute the notary, the robo- signers, the whole thing. And shortly after I did this, the only Register of Deeds in the United States of America who picked up the phone and called me was Jeff Thigpen.

I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. And he said to me, “I want to help. I want to get involved in this.” That’s a profile in courage as far as I’m concerned. Sadly, for whatever reason, and I’m not throwing other Registers of Deeds under the bus. Being the Register of Deeds it’s not like being in Congress or a United States senator, but we have duties. We have responsibilities.

We took an oath of office and said we’ll protect the integrity and the accuracy of those records. Trust me, if documents were being recorded that were fraudulent in a securities office of the secretary of state’s office or a governor’s office, they’d be all over it. And nobody seemed to care about this. And that was very troubling to me. And as Jeff said, it goes back to one thing, money. I’m absolutely, positively convinced that the banks, their attorneys, the title companies, everybody was just donating money, and donating, donating, donating.

The attorneys general, quite frankly, had a guy out in, it was in Ohio that they put in charge to look into this thing, and he raised enormous amounts of money in a short period of time that he never raised in his life. And Jeff and I sent him a letter and said, “You should step down. There’s something not right here.” I mean, am I right? Jeff will tell you.

[00:12:38.810] – Thigpen

You know. Hey. We’re going to throw people in jail.

[00:12:42.640] – O’Brien

Yeah.

[00:12:43.090] – Thigpen

And a year later, it was: “What happened?”

[00:12:45.970] – O’Brien

I mean, we asked, so people know, we asked very simply and said, look at when the Congress started and they started with all this committees and everything else we said, “Can we go? Can we be at the table? We’re the two Registers of Deeds?” We were never invited to the table. Well, obviously we weren’t because both of us have the knowledge and the facts behind us.

And when you have the truth, it’s very, very hard and very, very difficult to take guys like us on. And I’m not being arrogant, but I’ve been so frustrated by this because it’s my little registry of deeds and people elected me in 1977. I mean, I’m not somebody who just fell off the bus. I know what I’m doing. And to look at it every single day and not be able to tell people who really owns their mortgages is very troubled.

And the fraud and everything else that took place. I think that there’s no question it was the biggest scandal in the United States of America. You can talk about Watergate and talk about all these things fine. But this was the backbone of our country. This is people’s land records. This is their most important document in their life. They live the American dream. They bought a house.

They want to know who owns their mortgage and nobody cared. I’m being dead honest. Nobody went to jail. Jamie Dimon still is floating around. All the banks are floating around. I asked all of the banks, the top five banks, I privately went to them and said, “Will you come to the Salem Registry of Deeds and sit in my office? No press, no nothing. I want to show you what your bank did.

All I want you to do is come up with a solution.” Not one of them showed up, not one of them responded. They ignored me. Well, they found out that Jeff and I, you can ignore us, but we’ve got one thing. We got a mouth and then we met you guys with The Con. And if I can say this and I’m going to say it, The Con should have been on national television.

It should have been on HBO. It should have been on Netflix, and we all know why it wasn’t. We all know why it wasn’t, because they didn’t want the American people to hear the truth and see the truth as to what these banks did. And trust me, it’s going to happen again.

[00:15:14.610] – Lovell

True to form, Mr. O’Brien just really loads up the pins and knocks him down, because from my perspective, as the producer of The Con with my colleague, Eric, none of this made sense, quite frankly, until we started meeting the likes of you and John, you know, Jeff.  And we pulled every single thread, every single facet of the situation.

And now at this point, when we’ve got the product on a platinum platter that we had not just the dignity and the integrity of you guys and your professionalism, but from the SEC, the FBI, the DOJ, AGs that got RICO convictions on this whole thing, but yet this isn’t good enough for national television and something that basically destroyed at least 16 million filed foreclosures which is like 50 million people, and led to trillions and trillions of dollars in the aftermath. Crickets. Give us some perspective on the inside of what this macro version looks like from the details of your office.

[00:16:08.340] – Thigpen

Well, John does a great job of laying it out. And one of the things that’s really important for us to understand and if we don’t understand this, nothing else makes sense is we have to understand the history. And for a Register of Deeds, we come to work every day and we file land record documents from 8:00 to 5:00. People get their homes and move in.

But what was going on, particularly in the late 80s and 90s and I think Bill Black and some of your guests get into it, is banking goes from being something that is really boring to something that we had the breaking down of Glass-Steagall, with the onset of securitization engines beginning to take shape within Wall Street and the pooling of loans to be sold off as investment in the late 80s, early 90s, some things really started changing underneath our feet.

And John knows a lot about this. There are particular things that happen, like Angelo Mozilo, who was a CEO at Countrywide, and folks going with the Mortgage Bankers Association, knowing that they needed to create a technology infrastructure that would ultimately compete with Register of Deeds offices in order to be able to facilitate and enable the pooling of the loans in order to sell them off as investments on Wall Street.

And what happened after the crisis when we didn’t look at these systems and we blame people, those folks who were creating those systems did it in a way that they had no rules of the road. They did not have any regulation in any meaningful way or oversight. They blamed Register of Deeds offices as being these old clunky vehicles that could not adapt to this dynamic new financial enterprise that was going to help lower interest cost and allow people to get to expand homeownership and all this stuff.

So there was a competing narrative and a competing story that was going on. And as offices that if and county governments you have 25 departments, we’re probably the twenty fourth or fifth in the priority of people thinking that we matter unless they, of course, buy a home, get married, have a child, all that kind of stuff. What ends up happening is the context of an environment that facilitates this greed and fraud and criminality.

And then once all of that happens, as you all show with The Con and everything is that you had people like Marc Dann, who was an AG, who was really looking into this, and you had task force on the county level that were really looking into this. You had people who rose up during the S&L crisis and really held people accountable. And the sad part of all this is that John and I are where the rubber meets the road.

There were people come into our offices who were having heart attacks and strokes and losing their homes and committing suicide. And we’re seeing communities and it’s still going on. We’re seeing this perpetuation of communities who don’t have the asset bases within their communities that they had accumulated or were trying to because whenever the foreclosure proceedings and everything started happening whenever it started, a lot of the people that we represent never showed up in court because they couldn’t afford attorneys.

Or as you all were looking at in terms of appraisal fraud and I’m in meetings where attorneys, when all this is going down, talking about, “Well, maybe we can do this under the RICO statute. Maybe we can go after people.” And so when you say it’s a criminal enterprise and you really use this dramatic language about what happened, I think that we all need to stop for a second and say, “You know what? There’s a real argument here that that actually happened.”

And coming out of that to where we are today, the fundamentals of that system have not changed. If somebody can give me an argument that they have, I really would like to see it. And what we are not doing is organizing in such a way, and you all are doing a great job of really laying out the story, but we have got to raise our game in a way that we can really look at what happened, understand it, learn from it, and then serve the public interest in a better way than we are.

[00:20:42.940] – Lovell

It’s incredibly powerful to hear you say that as an opening statement. And I want to turn this back to you, John, briefly. Can you encapsulate really just the details of what the Registry of Deeds does, how it fits in the system, and when it doesn’t work and you start to see these mountains of evidence when you started to look into it, what would that ultimately constitute?

You said it in your opening statement. Right. But think of this whole process that we’re doing here with Steve. And this platform is to basically recontextualize, unpack all of the elements that went into this crime. And from your vantage, what do we need to understand, John?

[00:21:18.220] – Vaughan

Yeah, maybe frame it this way. If I am a homeowner and I have an interest in purchasing this home, walk me through from that perspective about what your office does, and then after that, talk about how MERS circumvents that.

[00:21:36.180] – O’Brien

It’s very simple. You buy a house. You have a deed. You have a mortgage. You have a number of documents that are recorded in the Registry of Deeds and it creates a chain of title so that you can look at that any time. You can follow it along and make sure that somebody hasn’t recorded something against your property. You want that to be accurate.

But what happened here was, you went to the local bank. In the old days, you sat across the table from a banker and you got your mortgage and you recorded it. They held it. You made your payments. All of a sudden they created the mortgage electronic registration system. And when that was formed, it gave Wall Street and the big banks a vehicle in which to move mortgages around.

And they bundled them up, as you know, and they sold them. So your mortgage is now owned by three or four people, you think. We don’t really know who owns them because they didn’t record assignments. They kept track of nothing. So the records in the registry immediately became tainted. And they became tainted not only because there was no accuracy or no follow-through as to who owned the mortgage, it became tainted because they had individuals, as you know, who were called robo-signers.

And one minute they were president. And they’re this, they’re that, they’re everything else. And when that happened, it destroyed the entire integrity of the land recordation system because there was no common thread to a person’s legal documents. Registries of Deeds are the cash cows for counties. We make an awful lot of money.

My registry takes in an average of a year $40 million. We have a budget of about $2.8 million. So it’s a tremendous amount of money. But when they didn’t record the assignments, we lost millions of dollars in revenue. The interesting part of this is the little local banks, of which there aren’t many left, if they sold your mortgage, which they have a right to do, they would record the assignment. They pay the fee. They let you know that Joe Smith now owned your mortgage.

The big banks didn’t do that. So what has happened is everybody’s tainted. Now to get back to mortgage fraud electronic registration system and what I think is going to be the next scandal. They’re going to try to put the Registry of Deeds out of business. They’re going to try to get a national registry. They’ve bought the New York Stock Exchange now.

They’re all merged together. They’ve bought simple file electronic recording companies that leave the people record the titles for them. They don’t want guys like Jeff Thigpen. They don’t want people who are going to stand up and say, “Wait a minute. What are you doing?” They want everything electronic and there’s a reason for it. It’s money. And that’s all it is.

And this whole thing going on in this country right now, and I think people have to be aware of this. I understand people selling their homes for far more money than they ever could imagine. And people are buying houses, at least in Massachusetts and I’m sure across the country paying enormous amounts of money. And the banks who claim we’re on everything, they’re lending all kinds of money.

Well, this thing is going to collapse sooner rather than later. Values are going to go down. I think it’s going to happen. They’re going to go in and they’re going to start this whole ball game all over again. And that’s the serious part, and we watch every single day in the registry. We don’t record robo-signers. We still don’t. They still try to send them in. We reject them.

What we’re watching now is for any kind of patterns that we see – what banks are sending in, what mortgage companies are sending. We’re seeing if there’s anything going on. But it’s very, very difficult because we don’t have support from anyone. And I think the one question that has to be asked is why is it only two guys who have been exposing this across the country?

We’re not crazy, although, and you know this, I was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. I’m fine. You can see that, but I’ve had attorneys who question, “Oh, he’s crazy. He’s got dementia. He’s got this and that.” And I tell them, “Come on down. Sit with me across the table. I’ll talk to you any day of the week.”

[00:26:16.040] – Lovell

Let’s illustrate that through the actual documentation fraud that you’ve had. You’ve mentioned robo-signing fraud, but for a newer audience that might not even be aware of the term robo-signing, can you just give us an example of what that means and how that played out in your registry?

[00:26:31.820] – O’Brien

Yeah. What happened was we would have, for example, a guy by the name of Brian Bly was a known robo-signer. We were looking at these documents and we were saying, “This signature isn’t right.” The signatures are all crazy and they would forge people’s names, you know that. What they were doing was they had to process these records real quick to get them into the registries to get the money on the street.

So what they did is they hired people who sat down and signed phony names all day long, not their own name, someone else’s. One minute they were signing as the vice president of a mortgage company. Then they were the notary notarizing someone else’s signature. And I have 39,000 of these documents sitting in my registry on display, and there’s absolutely no question that they were all fraud.

[00:27:36.910] – Steve Grumbine

39,000.

[00:27:38.800] – Lovell

Yeah, what does that constitute in the end, John? What happens to people after there’s a fraudulent name from a fictional VP in the process? What happens? What’s the consequence?

[00:27:48.790] – O’Brien

It clouds their title. I tell everybody my registry is a crime scene. And nobody visited it, by the way, that’s very important to know. I invited everybody, state officials, everybody, the attorney generals, the governors, the secretaries of state. I said, “Come on down. Take a peek. Come down to the crime scene. Take a look. Let’s see what it’s all about.” Nobody showed up. Now you’ve got to really think about that.

Are they that scared of the banks? I know it’s all nonsense. You listen to these banks and you . . . Listen, they merge with Wall Street and it’s all money, and I know I keep repeating myself, but it’s true. And we sit there every single day and look at it and nobody’s doing anything about it. You guys exposed it. Don’t ever forget that with The Con. If people would sit there and watch this. I think it would change. I think people would say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here?

[00:29:03.410] – Intermission

You are listening to The New Untouchables, a podcast brought to you by a collaboration of the creators of the docuseries The Con and Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.

[00:29:56.930] – Grumbine

I keep thinking about the Denver airport and I keep thinking about all the trolleys and trains throughout that thing just to get to each of the different destinations and arrivals. And I think about the conveyor belt of this process and all the jumping-off points and who the gatekeepers are at each point as the thing just keeps going on along the conveyor belt and think of Lucy and Ethel scarfing down the chocolates.

In this particular case, most people have no idea. They’re not envisioning that conveyor belt. They’re not envisioning all the cloverleaf off of this process map that show where this jumps off and then somebody does some fraud, puts it back into the mix. Somebody else picks up. Does some new fraud, passes it off, passes it down. And by the time it gets to you to register this stuff, it’s garbage.

But that’s a lot to understand if you didn’t watch that conveyor belt. To me, as I’m listening to this, I’m having all these epiphanies. But you made the great point. Why aren’t people up in arms about this? Why aren’t people doing something about this? Why are people afraid of the banks? And there’s probably a good reason why they’re not making any kind of effort to close the deal.

But for the average people, like many of the victims we’ve talked to, this entire conveyor belt and every ounce of that fraud, I think that picture needs to be in front of their face to really understand the depths of criminality that are taking place. And I think that visual is something our organization is going to look at putting together and putting it out there into the universe right now because I want to make sure that we do it. I think that would crack the seal on people’s minds to allow them to really get the full picture.

[00:31:44.400] – O’Brien

If I could, just one quick thing. You made a great point about the conveyor belt. They needed the Registry of Deeds. Without us, they had nothing because they had to record the documents, and we could have stopped that conveyor belt. Jeff tried to stop it. I tried to stop it. We both called upon registers across the country, “Don’t record robo-signers. Don’t record documents. Shut them down.”

If all the Registers of Deeds in this country stopped it and said, “For the next week, we’re not going to record any documents,” all I heard was “the whole world is going to fall down. Commerce is going to blow out. Oh, you can’t do this. This guy’s crazy,” and everything else. That’s how you stop them.

[00:32:34.650] – Thigpen

Yeah. People have the courage and the leadership to throw them in jail, and that did not happen. That did not happen. And what happened was we had immediate bailouts. We dumped a bunch of money into this system and by which they got bigger. We had 50 state attorney general investigations to give this veneer of completion that we’ve investigated, and we got a settlement, so to speak.

There were individual lawsuits that were going on. John is not talking out of school when he talks about all these robo-signed documents. Depositions. We both were involved in the sentencing hearing of Lorraine Brown with LPS, Doc X, where they are talking about people sitting around tables using bad notary stamps and signing all these names to documents, as people who live in our local communities are calling mortgage servicers and finding out, “OK, now who is servicing my loan and why did things change? And I’m in court for foreclosure and I have no idea who is in here representing the banks.”

And those law firms are operating under stopwatch justice, where they’re supposed to be facilitating as many foreclosures as possible so that their incentive structures can allow them to get bonuses. And we have disorganized folks that are supposed to be cops on the beat. Your local judges, God bless them. I love him to death, but they don’t know complex financial instruments.

And these too big to fail banks knew that. And those tall building law firm attorneys knew that. And so when we got into the process of it, trying to hold anybody accountable, it all fell apart. And then on the other side of it, the public licks their wounds. Like I said, people who were owning are now renting. And I think that what John alluded to related to this idea of where AI and technology, where the MERS systems and the electronic recording systems that are out there that are electronically recording documents, we’re moving into more electronic mortgage stuff.

On the one side, people say, “We need to do that. We need to do that because then we can create an audit trail.” OK, which is not a bad thing to have any type of audit trail, because rarely do we have the institutional capacity and leadership to be able to do audit trails. And that was part of the illusion in the system was that it was a shell game.

And so we have that on one hand and then this consolidated power structure over time that minimizes the localization of these records that if I’m a person in a local community, am I going to be able to go into a Register of Deeds office and figure out who has the assignment and the rights and interests in my property? Is there going to be that level of transparency and plainness and fair dealing that we know have already been undermined?

And when I say all this, please, if you listen to what I’m saying and you’re out there, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. What I am is someone who has seen lives destroyed and I have seen in open courtrooms, these big financial firms have tons of attorneys going up against people who may not even have an attorney. And they know the judicial system, they know the rules and regulations of the road because they helped create them, particularly over the past 30 years.

And so when we wake up and everybody says, “Oh, well, it was bad morality and they shouldn’t have done it, but there’s no laws to hold them accountable. So I guess they can just get off.” The fact of the matter is they have attorneys and law firms who lobby in Washington and state capitals to create the laws they want and need in order to facilitate their ability to make money in this system.

And so you have that layer of this and underneath it, you have your local attorneys who I love to death, and they’re trying to help people buy and sell homes. And so that system is continuing but is severely hampered by what the financial system has done over the past 30 years to turn it into something that creates a significant lack of accountability.

And without that accountability, we’re screwed because the next financial crisis that comes or the next new model of securitization that gets connected to any type of housing policy is going to continue to undermine local communities in really dangerous ways. And people are already feeling alienated, people on the left and the right. When we sued the banks in 2012, the Occupy people on the left love me.

When we sue Fannie and Freddie for not paying excise taxes. They were created in the public interest originally and then became traded on Wall Street. And then they got out of paying local taxes to the local government. And so there is this distance that’s being created in the financial services industry connected to housing policy that is something that we did not have for hundreds of years.

And it slowly got whittled away, and so when John says, “well, I’m afraid we’re not going to exist.” Or they’re going to create a national registry and neuter us totally. There’s something to that. And unless we listen and hear that people that we represent are going to get taken advantage of.

[00:38:43.880] – Grumbine

One of the big things that’s happening throughout the United States is what we call the race to the bottom, and states are cash strapped with federal burdens, unfunded mandates. And the states are still left with this huge delta in their budgets, and so we’re seeing that local appraisers, they’re raising the property values.

They’re elevating that to increase the tax base as a means of being able to fund themselves. And what I’m hearing you say is based on the fraudulent nature of these megabanks that are doing this stuff outside the local community, they’re further starving the coffers of state and local governments, preventing them from being effective and ultimately creating a situation where they don’t have the means to be able to police this locally because they don’t have the resources to do so. Would that be a fair statement?

[00:39:38.340] – Thigpen

Yeah, there’s been a “bigging” of everything – big finance, big energy, big tech – all these different systems that have been facilitated and created within our economy are now the results of them. While we have cell phones and people paying more for energy, they’re being just taken advantage of related to cell phones and technology.

Their access to fiber and high-speed Internet is significantly limited because of interest that if we created laws to make that harder, you couple that with political gerrymandering in states where ideologically it goes to the far right or maybe even the far left, but representative government where people have to actually compete in the field of ideas and that, again, assets staying within a community.

In my small town of Pender County, we used to have three or four hardware stores in Burgaw. We don’t have hardly any anymore, but we have a Wal-Mart. You know what I’m saying? We can get our shovel’s from China. And the people who work there whose money used to stay in those communities are now working for, I don’t know, $8, $10, $11 an hour at Wal-Mart.

And the money that comes from all of that goes to some gated community in Kentucky or somewhere else. And that money doesn’t stay in communities. And so this is in a lot of ways, basic economics and its basic representative government and the rule of law. This isn’t rocket science. I just think that at times people lose sight of it because they’ve been screwed over so much and the unemployment rate in local communities is so high and the coffers going to pay for E.M.S. and D.S.S. and education and all that are getting slimmer.

People take what they can get and they’re ending up getting more lower-end service jobs. We have more Medicaid-eligible populations and they’re having health issues, education expenses, a lot of cases, there are problems related to funding, and our tax base gets squeezed. And while that’s going on, it’s not like some people aren’t doing really well better than they’ve ever been before.

And when that’s connected to a 24/7 news cycle and you have major financial interests controlling the flow of information through cell phones and the Internet and all that, and they pound it away, especially in rural communities, for example, and pit us all against one another in ways that are just plain tragedy.

We end up in a reality where we are uprooted, as my mom would say, “We don’t own our ass and we don’t know our butt from a hole in the ground,” and one day we’re fighting over cancel culture and all these other things that in the grand scheme of things is just one more tinkling symbol of something that can fill our brains as we are scrolling through Facebook, and bots and algorithms are telling us something else about somebody else so we can be mad at them.

And while that’s going on, we’re losing generational wealth. We’re creating intergenerational poverty. We’re not dealing with the real issues that create a country that we would all want to be proud of. We’re not and it is evil. And I’m saying that knowing that there are people who are in all this that I agree with and disagree with on a number of things, but that’s what we need.

We need people to come together and say, you know what? We need to create a society that works for all of us. And we can’t let these forces keep pitting us against one another, as they are every single day that gets into housing policy, gets into economic development policy, gets into zoning, it gets into our political institutions and ruins us and we need to do better.

[00:43:39.860] – Grumbine

I want to piggyback on something I said right entering into this, and then I want to turn it over to Eric. But one of the things in terms of inflating those asset values for local revenues, for tax evaluations, for each of these properties, this asset bubble that we’re creating by doing this ends up going all the way up until the bubble bursts at the Fed, which then, in turn, absorbs those losses and lets the rich stay super-rich and leaves us wondering where our homes are.

This evaluation of assets is how all of this stuff is done. That is the core principle to all the lending and loaning and sales, etcetera. I am curious as to whether or not when people think of that conveyor belt we talked about it a minute ago, you see the bubble growing and growing and growing along the conveyor belt until like a bubble gum, it pops in everyone’s faces.

The only thing is and I think this is probably the thing that most people can really find a common enemy in, all of us homeowners, regular people at the end of that conveyor belt get slathered with all that bubble gum spray. We’re the ones that are hit with the bomb, but the rich walk away once again. This ownership class of people is walking away with cash hand over fist while we’re walking away with suicides and all the other things that you so eloquently pointed out. I just wanted to make that point.

[00:45:08.330] – Thigpen

One more point is there are outside investors from other communities who are coming in and buying property in local communities all across this country. And you don’t know who they are. And of course, that is a part of this as well, is the system of inflated value that at the moment, if I’m trying to sell my home, I’m like, I want to get a good value on my property because it may help me a little bit. But the problem is when it becomes systemic like that, it completely undermines the system. And in the long term, we end up paying.

[00:45:50.510] – O’Brien

When the system explodes, when it blows up again, Congress will be working in 72 hours to bail the banks . . .

[00:46:01.300] – Thigpen

Right.

[00:46:01.720] – O’Brien

. . . give them all kinds of money and we’ll hear that the world is going to come to an end, but we can’t help kids with student loans, and just think about that. You’ve got all these young people out there that want to buy a house that are strapped with student loans.

You’ve got parents who cosigned so that their kids could live the American dream and go to college and buy a house, but they can’t because when they go to get a mortgage, they tell them, “Oh, you signed on your son’s or your daughter’s student loans.” My point of all this is it’s not fair. It’s not equal.

And Jeff touched on this, and that’s what troubles me because they let certain groups like the banks and Wall Street do whatever the hell they want to do, but they don’t help the little person. We both have seen people in the registries every day, even as recently, now I’m involved in a case in Boston, in the land court with this poor woman who came to this country, lived the American dream, got set up for failure from day one.

And Wells Fargo is doing everything in their world to destroy her. And they want me to expunge her affidavit that I allowed her to record in my registry outlining her case. They don’t want that. And I said to them, “Fine, I’ve got 8,600 of your fraudulent mortgages. You want to expunge those?” This is what’s going on, and let me tell you something, they can solve this in five minutes, the Senate, the Congress, the president can do it in a minute.

And I’m a Democrat and we missed the boat on this. The Republicans missed the boat. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re Democrat, Republican, independent. It’s all because the banks can do anything they want. You can solve it. It’s very, very simple. You sell someone’s mortgage, you notify them, you provide them and tell them exactly who you sold it to.

You record that assignment in the Registry of Deeds and everything is public transparency. If I hear that word one more time, I’m going to go jump off a bridge. Everything’s got to be transparent. Well, it’s not.

[00:48:13.710] – Grumbine

Right.

[00:48:14.260] – O’Brien

It’s not for them. I had Registers of Deeds say to me, “Johnny, we can’t do this. We record every document that comes in and let the courts figure it out.” The courts can’t figure it out. They’re going there and banks and lawyers are committing frauds upon the court.

They’re lying. They’re standing there before judges and saying, “Oh, no, your honor. This is legitimate.” No, it isn’t. Put Jeff Thigpen on the stand. Put me on the stand. We’ll show you in five minutes.

[00:48:46.310] – Vaughan

Well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it, that these fraudulent documents are documents that any one of these lawyers from one of the banks can go to court with and use as proof of their narrative against the homeowner who’s trying to say, no, that’s not the case?

[00:49:01.970] – O’Brien

That’s exactly right. And they know it. And they’re officers of the court, these lawyers. And they’re all, quite frankly, lying. They are lying in the court. I had an assistant district attorney, an assistant said to me, “Well, Johnnie, what do you want us to do?” I said, “How about this? Let’s not get too technical about it. Indict them all on mail fraud. That’s a very simple charge.

They use the United States mail to send me a fraudulent document to record. Mail fraud. How’s that? Very simple, let’s do that.” Can you imagine if the American people were watching the news at night and they saw the leaders of the five largest banks in this country doing the perp walk?

Some poor homeowner who put down that he didn’t own a car and didn’t have a car loan, all the banks want to indict him because he filed for his mortgage and he left out certain information, they’ll indict him, but they won’t indict these guys. These guys walk. And they’re going to continue to walk.

I was a city councilman in Lynn for six years, and the Lynn City Council is no different than the United States Congress or the United States Senate. You can do anything you want to do if you want to do it, and they can solve all of these issues, but sadly, it’s fundraisers, fundraisers, fundraisers.

I mean the guy in Ohio, if it ever was a case of an attorney general, it just disgusted me. I mean, this guy never raised that much money in his life. All of a sudden, he’s heading up the investigation and he’s getting all kinds of money from the banks. Come on.

[00:50:54.880] – Thigpen

I would like to say one thing.

[00:50:56.280] – O’Brien

Sure.

[00:50:56.740] – Thigpen

John, I love you.

[00:50:59.980] – O’Brien

[Laughter]

[00:50:59.980] – Thigpen

I do. And you have been such an inspiration and a leader to me, and I’m kind of getting choked up. But I can think back when I was in my darkest hour, seeing all this stuff and feeling like I didn’t have any damn body around. And you were there. And so I appreciate you and I appreciate your service and your commitment to all this brother. I mean, I really do. And I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.

[00:51:30.160] – O’Brien

I thank you, Jeff because you are the only one, the only one that kept in touch with me and has worked with me from I think you called me three days after we started this. This isn’t an admiration society. He had the courage to listen to something. He represents the district where Bank of America exists, ok.

And the president of Bank of America lives about an hour from my registry, but it’s too much for him to drive there. But remember something, they’re big PR people. It’s all the media, and I’m going to say this, I have to say this. The Boston Globe is one of the most liberal newspapers in the country. They don’t write stories about this because the banks lend everybody money.

It’s a big game. But it’s a very, very dangerous game. And people should have been held accountable. They should have paid for what they did. They should have righted the wrong. And basic little people that I represent and Jeff represents, got screwed. They lost their houses. They lost their lives.

They lost everything. And they were made out to be deadbeats. They weren’t deadbeats. They were people who tried to live the American dream. And it got taken away from them by people, quite frankly, who just wanted greed and more money, more money, more money.

[00:53:13.100] – Lovell

I have one final question that was about as powerful as I expected, but hopefully, it just dropped the floor out of the people that are paying attention to and I pray will spread this word far and wide until everybody in this nation starts to wake up to the criminal behavior of our financial system that now owns our government. I have one question to you guys, and then we’re going to fade out. What major documentary initiative, what major film, who has come to you guys to allow you to tell these truths to the American people?

[00:53:49.910] – O’Brien

Nobody, just you.

[00:53:51.170] – Lovell

[Laughter] So . . .

[00:53:55.100] – O’Brien

Nobody. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I’ve had a couple of reporters, the German television station, as you know, reached out to me. They sent a crew over. They interviewed. They wanted to know about Deutsche Bank and all of their fraudulent documents. I had them all piled up and they were the only one. I had NBC came in once.

They did a little piece, nothing like this. Nothing, nothing, nothing like what you people are doing. This has to get out, and I know Jeff and I, we’ve talked and said, “If I hit the megabucks for a couple of hundred million, I’m going to put this on TV.” Because this needs to be out there. I’ll tell you something. NPR, all the television shows, PBS and all of this should be on there. You can consolidate this down to a three-hour show that people need to watch. They need to see this.

[00:54:59.610] – Lovell

Well, and I’m going to close it out like this because we have to move on. Unfortunately, we could talk for literally days. And I want to thank you on behalf of both Eric and I and Steve and really everybody that has been involved with our project from day one to thank you guys directly. None of this made sense and I had to make it make sense.

And we went on this amazing journey and we discovered every piece of the puzzle and then we put it together. And then just like everybody else and I remember reminding myself of this the whole time, I’m like, wait a second. Michael Winston goes the distance to out Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide. Richard Bowen goes the distance to out Citigroup and Robert Rubin, former treasury secretary.

And I could go on and on and on. And I’m thinking to myself, wait a second. We’ve sent bits and pieces of these guys out there, but never their true story, because, of course, as a producer, I get to hear the true story, trying to develop this, to move forward, to get what we have. That includes you guys in every step of the way. It got more and more and more and more, and it never ends.

And here we are. And I’m pleading with you, the American people, stop fighting each other. We have to purge corruption. Corruption is the single most national security threat that exists not only to ourselves, but the future, the sanctity of everything this country stands for. And we’re going to do it peacefully by doing it through our system because we’ve got enough public pressure and critical mass to where you, the audience, you, the citizen, is finally informed enough to demand justice.

Because if we don’t do it, forget about it. It’s over. And on that note, I’m going to say this part’s over. Thank you guys for your time. And we love you. And thank you for being the genuine professionals and citizens that this country deserves in the positions of institutions that we depend on for integrity. Thank you.

[00:56:57.780] – O’Brien

Thank you for having us.

[00:57:02.830] – Ending credits

The New Untouchables is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Rose Ann Rabiola Miele, and promotional artwork by Cristina of Paradigms and Revolutions Design Group The New Untouchables is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to The New Untouchables, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Dirt Lawyers 

Lewy Body Dementia

LPS, DocX 

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