This series is an up-close-and-personal account of the heroes introduced by Eric Vaughan and Patrick Lovell’s “The Con” which took a simple but revolutionary approach to explain the epidemics of elite “Control Fraud” driving the great financial crisis of 2007-2008 and continuing today.

Bruce Jacobs, a veteran prosecutor and defense attorney in Miami, joins Patrick Lovell, Steve Grumbine and Eric Vaughan for a discussion beginning with the concept of integrity.

The story of David vs. Goliath has been memorialized throughout history and popular culture as each generation puts its own spin on the timeless story to translate for that era. The same can be said now through the story of Bruce Jacobs, a former Miami prosecutor turned defense attorney who has committed his life to the noble pursuit of justice.

As has been unpacked throughout each episode of The New Untouchables is the stark reality of the corruption most Americans are intuitively aware of, but now can understand clearly. We live in a system where the law serves upward and comes down hard; how the country can finance criminal fraud and then cover it up in the courts. However, you have yet to encounter a more straightforward revelation of what’s happened to millions of the most vulnerable until now.

Bruce Jacobs is a modern-day David combating the Goliaths of Bank of America and Chase that have outsized influence in the country and actually argue “Privilege” to prevent discovery of their criminal activity in the courts when pursuing foreclosures.

The truth has been presented time and again throughout The New Untouchables; from Addie Polk to Cindy Brown, to elderly women everywhere, and now Ms. Anna Rodriguez, a Senior Cuban woman who like everyone else was set up by the massive crime wave that constituted the 2008 Financial Crisis.

It never ended. What’s happening now with Rental Evictions and Forbearance Moratoriums ending is the exact same recipe.

See for yourself the up close and uncomfortable truths our judicial system leans heavily towards, the power of the county as they railroad the most vulnerable in bulldozing liberty and justice for all. Mr. Jacobs isn’t standing for it. Will you after learning the truth?

Only time will tell.

The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files
S2:E10 – Justice is Coming?
September 12, 2021

 

[00:00:00.000] – Bruce Jacobs [intro/music]

We have a government that has over the last 40 years we’ve watched major shifts in the way everything works. We don’t have a marketplace of ideas anymore where we can have free speech, encouraging everyone to make the best decision. We have marketplaces of different ideas that are dividing us, and that’s by design.

[00:00:27.680] – Bruce Jacobs [intro/music]

Once we took over Hawaii, these people were made citizens, but they weren’t treated like citizens. They were being discriminated against . . .disgusting. And Bank of America, particularly in Hawaii, was redlining the native Hawaiians for years going back to the 80s, 90s, you couldn’t get a loan from Bank of America to buy a house if you were native Hawaiian.

[00:00:52.810] – Eric Vaughan [intro/music]

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

[00:01:03.620] – Patrick Lovell

Welcome back to The New Untouchables. In today’s episode it’s really a great honor to bring in Bruce Jacobs, a defense attorney from Miami, Florida. Many in the foreclosure community around the country know Bruce’s name. A lot of things happening in the moment.

Bruce has found time in his incredibly busy schedule to speak with us today. And on behalf of our team, Steve Grumbine and Eric Vaughan, Bruce, I want to welcome you to our program. And if you would please enlighten us into who you are and where you are currently in this incredible journey.

[00:01:37.040] – Bruce Jacobs

Well, thank you, Patrick, Steve, and Eric. It’s nice to be here. So I’m a lawyer in Miami practicing 25 years. I started as a prosecutor in the Miami State Attorneys office in ’97. I represented banks for years in foreclosures. And then when the crash hit in ’08, I got into foreclosure defense and this is all I’ve been doing for the most part since then.

And I approach foreclosure defense the way I approach prosecution – look for crimes and prosecute them. And that journey started a long time ago. And you’d be surprised to know that actually a lot of these banks are foreclosing on people and committing crimes in the process – forgery, perjury things like that. And that’s what I spend my time dealing with.

[00:02:25.460] – Lovell

Alright. So it was kind of like rrrrrrrrr. We just heard the record scrape. Right from the very beginning, you come out swingin’ in a way that really we all need to hear. And again, I want to remind our audience because we reach a broad swath of America and we’re going to grow at this and people will find our series and they’ll be able to walk step by step with what we’ve introduced in The New Untouchables. But I want to ask you, Steven, did you just hear what Bruce just told you? What did Bruce just tell you, Steven?

[00:02:51.220] – Steve Grumbine

Banks are committing fraud right now as we speak.

[00:02:54.840] – Lovell

And I’m going to turn this back to you, Bruce, because I don’t know if I heard this as clearly as I thought I did. But you were once a prosecutor as well earlier in your career, correct?

[00:03:03.570] – Jacobs

Yeah. That’s how I started. I used to prosecute bad guys for drug dealing and violent crimes and robberies and all kinds of things like that. And I know you guys have a nice connection with William Black. I remember reading “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.”

And I decided a long time ago when I got into foreclosure defense that if I see things that aren’t right, I’m not going to back down from anyone telling me that I can’t prosecute someone who’s lying to a judge. I find that to be a great equalizer.

[00:03:35.000] – Lovell

But what you’re saying to me is and what blows my mind because I started with a question, Bruce, when this entire journey started for us. I just . . . I come from a background, my father is an attorney, is the gold standard. Everything in our family revolved around integrity. Am I hearing you correctly? Does integrity mean something to you?

[00:03:52.020] – Jacobs

So that is the word that I live my life by. I decided a long time ago that this is a spiritual journey for me. This is a David versus Goliath fight. And when you try to do anything spiritual, you have to have integrity. You have to have connection. It’s got to be truth. It’s going to resonate with ancient energies, if you will.

And the work that I’ve done has always started off in just a fundamental place of if I was a prosecutor, would I allow this to happen in my courtroom? And I would never prosecute. I was one of the guys that used to get in trouble because I would go to my division chief, and I would tell them, “Look, I don’t think this case has merit. I don’t think this case is one that should be prosecuted.”

And sometimes I got in trouble for doing that. But that was just the way I’ve lived my life. I raised four children. We’re a big scout family were heavy into the Boy Scouts, and you teach about honesty, integrity, loyalty like those aren’t just words. Those are ways of living – the code I live by.

[00:04:54.720] – Eric Vaughan

So just curious. Your experience as a lawyer on both sides are the courts, in your estimation, like, fairly balanced as far as how they represent the rights of banks as opposed to people who are borrowing from them?

[00:05:10.760] – Jacobs

So here’s what I’ll say. I’m not going to get into a conversation about the courts and people can decide for themselves what they think of the court system and what they think of the government itself. I think that there’s clearly a huge number of people in the country that went through the last foreclosure crisis and felt like they weren’t treated fairly.

And I think that we are living in a world where banks and the corporations that rose up with them are in danger of leaving us all homeless and penniless in the lands our forefathers founded, which is what Thomas Jefferson said. God knows now hundreds of years ago, he was warning about that. So I think that my job is to go into every court and to assume the judge is going to be fair and partial and present my evidence that there is fraud and leave it to the judge to make that decision.

And there are judges who worked with me and agreed with me and there are judges who haven’t, and it’s not my place to comment on why it’s just my place to comment on the fact that I believe the Constitution is what we all swore the oath to. I believe everyone on every side if you are honest about what it means to be a patriot means that you are sworn to protect a system that is set up by our Constitution.

And the Fifth Amendment says that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Look, I think that what we’re seeing today is a lot of people that are frustrated with the government because the government is supposed to be promoting the general welfare. That’s in the preamble of the Constitution.

And I think everyone would agree our government has of the last few decades gotten more and more focused on protecting and promoting the welfare of a very select few, that small segment of the population with all the money and power that live by a different set of laws, which is what we’re supposed to be fighting against.

So that’s what I do is I go into court every day and I remind these judges that we’re all officers of the court. There is a Constitution that we’re supposed to be defending and you can’t take people’s property without due process and frauds in forclosures is not due process.

[00:07:20.840] – Lovell

Okay, so what you’re telling me is something that we all just expect in this country. Look, the analogy I always use, Mr. Jacobs, is if I get on an airplane, do I think there’s a small percentage chance that an accident can happen, of course. I know that we’re humans. Things happen. Accidents happen.

But do I have an expectation, a reasonable expectation that I’m going to get on a plane and fly from point A to point B safely? Of course, I do. Why? Because we have rules and regulations and all sorts of scenarios and science and engineering that go into making that possible. So we expect the exact same from the courts.

Bruce, we’re talking to you today in a very, incredibly important time in our country’s history. Can you bring us up to speed on why maybe the analogy that I just laid out might not be necessarily accurate from where you’re sitting? And what do we need to understand?

[00:08:11.740] – Jacobs

I think that what we need to understand today is that we have a government that has over the last 40 years, we’ve watched major shifts in the way everything works. We don’t have a marketplace of ideas anymore where we can have free speech, encouraging everyone to make the best decision. We have marketplaces of different ideas that are dividing us and that’s by design.

I think that we are watching corporations. It’s always been forget about what mechanisms they use. It’s always been that small segment of the population with all the money and power living by the different set of laws and dividing us and conquering us, however, they choose to do it. And I think that what we’re seeing today is the fall out of 40 years of people forgetting who they are supposed to be representing.

I was always shocked when I heard how many hours Congressmen spend dialing for dollars instead of writing laws that would help people. But that’s the system. You want to become a chairman of a powerful committee, you gotta raise money. And how do you do that by talking to lobbyists in the basement of the legislative office building where they promise to fund your campaign and the campaign of your colleagues if you agree to do what they want you to do, and then you make these committee assignments.

You become a powerful person, and all of that is designed to make it so whenever there’s profits to be made, that small segment makes them. And whenever there’s losses to be had, the rest of us have to carry the losses. And we’re watching this again. We’re watching it now. Ever since the COVID Pandemic hit, these trillionaires have become far wealthier, most people are still suffering and there is no help for the people.

Meanwhile, we’re buying up all these securitizations taking all this debt from Wall Street that is probably not going to pay, and we’re paying full dollar for them while the treasury is getting depleted and that money should be going to help the people. Government’s supposed to promote the general welfare, and somehow that became synonymous with socialism. But it’s in the preamble of the Constitution.

[00:10:30.020] – Grumbine

I want to ask you a question. You told us offline that one of the most important things about your work are the case studies that you’ve been involved in. You’ve got some great stories that really put a spotlight on these issues. Can you take us through some of the court battles that you’ve been through? What are some of the ones that would really bring this to light?

[00:10:53.780] – Jacobs

So, yeah, I’m happy to. I think that I’ve been doing foreclosure defense for over a decade, and I’ve tried lots and lots of these cases, and I’ve had some great stories and some great results for a lot of clients. And what’s happening now to me, it’s always interesting how everything happens at its perfect time.

And I’m watching these stories all percolate at the same time. And to form this, I think meaningful reason to get involved and to take action. Most of the clients I’m protecting right now are elderly, victims of predatory loans. I have one woman. Her name is Miss Williams James, and Miss Williams James is an African American school teacher.

Her husband fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was an African American fighter pilot who used to run missions in all those wars. And he retired as Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. He spent his days with Ms. Williams James teaching kids in every city here in Miami. And when he died, she took over the mortgage, a $51,000 mortgage with Bank of America.

And she paid her mortgage every month. She would get a cashier’s check from the bank. She’d get a receipt. She’d pay the bill. She’d pay her taxes. She’d pay her insurance, and she kept everything in her nice little shoebox. And then one day she got sued by Bank of America for foreclosure. And she spent years talking to everyone she could think of to talk to.

called the FBI, the CFPB, the Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s office, the NAACP, whoever it was you could think of. And her problem was that nobody really believed her that she’d paid all her bills, but she had the receipts. She had the canceled checks. And it wasn’t until they got a judgment against her and they set her house for sale that she finally got a lawyer who was able to articulate what was going on.

And the lawyer went in front of a judge named Jennifer Bailey here in Miami, who’s one of the administrative chief judges. She wrote the book on foreclosures in Florida. And the judge read the motion which basically said Bank of America admits that they received all of this woman’s payments. And yet they’re still trying to move forward.

And you should vacate the judgment due to fraud, which is what Judge Bailey did. And you would think that that would have been awesome for her and would have solved all her problems. But she fell into the same system that most people are going to deal with, which is right after the case, they never resolved her account and never made it clear like what she owes, doesn’t owe.

They just transferred servicing and the new servicer transferred servicing, and that servicer transferred servicing. So she ends up back in foreclosure on the same exact default that they already said was fraud but she had been paying. And meanwhile, she’s still paying her original payments at $300 a month to Bank of America every month, and they’re taking the payments.

Now, years later, when I got involved, I understood what happened, like they transferred servicing. Chase was taking her payments and should have returned them and wasn’t. But nobody was getting the payments to the proper servicer. And she was by herself in foreclosure for years begging the judge to help her.

And one day, maybe about a year before the trial, the judge said, “You know what? I’ve heard enough. Bank of America return all her payments, just give her a check, write her back for everything she had.” And a client left saying, “How does it help me?” And she got a check for five years worth of payments, $18,000 Bank of America gave her and they could have given it to the new servicer and fixed everything up, but they didn’t.

They just gave her back the 18 grand. So by the time I get involved, we go to trial. And I’ll say this like she had the same Bank of America fraud that I fight about that we’re going to hopefully talk about sometime soon on the show. But her evidence was all fake. Not only had she paid her mortgage, but they came in with a fake assignment, forged endorsement.

It’s a felony to forge a signature of a company and then pretend like that’s the real signature of that company. If I were to do that or you do that, we’d go to prison. Matter of fact, there’s a foreclosure defense lawyer from the West Coast of Florida who’s right now serving nine years in prison for nine counts of forgery because he did just that in Bank of America foreclosures.

And what basically came about is we go to trial, and the judge doesn’t want to hear about any of it. Doesn’t want to hear about the fraud. Doesn’t want to hear about the forgery, doesn’t know anything about the perjury, objections overruled, objections overruled. Meanwhile, everything the bank is fighting about, they get to do whatever they want.

They’re allowed to have a witness testify that she worked for four different banks over ten years. And now she can admit all their records because she is qualified to say that they are all trustworthy and accurate, and admits the Bank of America records were all fraudulent through this witness who worked for Bank of America ten years before she said in, a different department.

So you’re following this whole trial and you watch how this thing plays out. And what was amazing to me was we won the trial on the technicality. I gave the judge a chance. I was like, “Judge, let’s forget about me fighting with you about the unconstitutionality of everything you’re doing in this case. And just focus on the fact that they forgot to put in the evidence that the prior judgment was vacated.

So that means that all they have is a note that’s canceled. A note that canceled is worthless unless the judgment was vacated. They didn’t do it. We win.” And she bit. She bit hard because she knew. I mean, this poor woman was in tears having a breakdown in the middle of her testimony about how it’s been 10 years, and she paid her mortgage and everything else.

And she just wants them to leave her alone. But that was three months ago. Now the judge has allowed the bank to reopen the case, allowed them to put in that order that vacates the judgment. So what we thought were won, and I said, “Look, if you’re going to put in the order, put in the motion, too.” And the judge saw that they totally admitted that they were here on the same exact lawsuit that was thrown out for fraud.

And we’re still waiting to see what is going to happen for Miss William James, because they have yet to decide whether they’re going to just give a judgment or whether they’re going to say, you can’t come back after committing fraud. But that’s just one of a whole bunch of stories.

[00:17:29.590] – Lovell

Yeah. So, Bruce, I was just going to jump in because, look, so I’m a producer, right? I’m a Hollywood guy. I didn’t expect to have to go through this 13 year odyssey to come to grips with what you just told us. If I just heard this the first time, I’d be like, you got to be freaking kidding me. But what we’ve learned, really, there were 16 million filed foreclosures by 2012.

So the amount of people that got caught up in this madness, and we’ve learned and we have on the show so many people that have told us so many horror stories. But what hasn’t happened is it hasn’t gotten to the broader ecosphere. It hasn’t gotten to America through the mainstream. It hasn’t even been broadcast except through one book and a couple articles here and there.

David Dayen comes to mind. But as a film guy, the most horrific character I’ve ever seen in my life was Denzel Washington in Training Day, the corrupt cop. Right. And I’m like, “how is this possible?” And so we know it’s possible. We brought some of the victims. We’re going to talk more about it. You’re in the midst of mammoth discovery.

We talked offline about the parting of the Red Sea at the moment, and we’ve got a shot to move. Can you bring our audience up to speed on really what you’re in the midst of at this moment? And then we’ll get back specific examples of some of your clients.

[00:18:44.640] – Jacobs

So what I have found in my years of foreclosure defense is that all of the defenses that everyone used to raise when the crisis first started have all been basically dealt with by the appellate courts, and there are no defenses to foreclosure of any substance left except that the whole thing is a fraud.

And that is an unusual concept to say, but what I have uncovered is systemic fraud – that Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase when they took over Countrywide and Washington Mutual started to fabricate more evidence to foreclose. They took over foreclosures that were the robo signing scandal, which was basically the banks were fabricating assignments and mortgages in millions of cases that the FBI says was all fraudulent.

The FBI said they didn’t have the paperwork. So they created these fake assignments and presented them in courts all over the country. And that became the 2011 OCC consent order that became the 2012 $25 billion national mortgage settlement where these banks, Chase and Bank America in particular, made promises to the government, to their federal regulator and to the Department of Justice that they would stop creating fraudulent documents and presenting them in court.

So I’m lucky. In South Florida, I have been a foreclosure defense lawyer for a long time. I’ve had thousands of families I’ve helped over the years. And every time I go in front of a judge, I have an opportunity to convince them to let me take discovery about this fraud or that fraud, and there’s been frauds about all these cases that are being prosecuted.

The banks have basically figured out a way to make it cheaper and easier to do the work by lying about the records that they’re getting. So normally, if I’m a prosecutor prosecuting an economic crime case and I want to introduce records from different banks, I got to get each bank to authenticate their records and admit them as business records under the law, under the rules.

And these banks have all convinced the appellate courts around the country that, well, because we’re checking the records when we forward a loan from the prior service, and we make sure they’re accurate, that should be enough to make them admissible. Court said, “Okay, sounds good to us.”

Problem now is that Nation Star, Ditech, Rushmore, Bay, Caliber, Ocwen, all of the major servicers, they’re all lying about this. There is no check for accuracy. And I’ve got the heads of their forwarding department admitting, their corporate reps admitting . . .

[00:21:20.000] – Grumbine

Wow!

[00:21:20.980] – Jacobs

So this is systemic perjury. And my job is to present this all to judges and get them to do something. And what’s been happening is that I’ve had my trial judges, mostly here in Miami who have said, “Yeah, that’s fraud,” and issued what they call a contempt proceedings.

So a judge has inherent contempt powers in order to make sure that they regulate the courtroom, that they uphold the highest standards of practice. If I were to walk into a judge and I’d say, “Judge you’re an f-ing sob.” I’d be in contempt, right? They can punish me. They can put me in jail. They can put me on probation. They could fine me. They could do whatever they choose to do.

If I get caught lying in a personal injury case, and I say I was never injured before and I actually had surgery from a past accident, my case gets thrown out. I can get charged with perjury. I can get charged with contempt. The rules of contempt powers are there for a reason. That’s the only way you can make sure that these large financial institutions follow the law.

So I’ve had judges plenty of times now start content proceedings about various frauds, and every time they get stopped. The banks run to the appellate court here in Miami. The appellate court issues a stay, and eventually, they have found some reason or another to prevent the prosecution from going forward.

So most recently in June, I was in front of a judge named Beatrice Butchko here in Miami who I think should be on the US Supreme Court. She is to me, amazing. And she has over and over and over again, whenever a bank walked into her courtroom and tried to commit fraud, she hit him with an order to show cause. And she did it against Ocwen, she did it against HSBC. She did it against Nation Star.

And now she’s doing it against Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, Carrington Home Loan Servicing, and their lawyer, Nathaniel Callahan, who’s a partner in an Am 200 law firm called Akerman LLP, one of the top law firms in Florida. And so Judge Butchko had an evidentiary hearing, a trial, on my motion to vacate judgment due to fraud because the client had one of these forged endorsements from Countrywide.

Anytime you see a rubber stamped endorsement on your note in a foreclosure look to see if it’s from Washington Mutual or Countrywide. And if it is, call me because it’s fraud, it’s forgery, it’s perjury, it’s obstruction of justice, destruction of records, violation of subpoenas for those records, it’s backdating records, defiance of court orders.

I mean, this is the most scorched earth, dishonest type of practice that anyone can ever do. And my whole belief is that at some point it’s going to be enough for a judge to say. “Not in my courtroom.” So Judge Butchko was holding this evidentiary hearing, and in the middle of it, the bank lied. Bank of New York was called to the stand and asked “what’s the involvement of Bank America?”

And they said they don’t know when Bank of America is the servicer and the master service. So Butchko hit him with a contempt proceeding. “You guys lied to me. I find probable cause you lied to me.” She followed the procedure. She followed the rule. We serve the order to show cause and it sets a criminal arraignment.

It’s now a criminal case pending against Bank of America, Bank of New York, Carrington, and their lawyer that says that they can be held in contempt. They can go to jail. The lawyer can be referred to the bar. It’s the court’s inherent contempt powers, whatever she needs to do to punish the bank for this fraud. And this is just lying about the facts that would ultimately have gotten to the ultimate proof that Bank of America is forging all these endorsements all over the country.

[00:25:08.990] – Grumbine

I want to just ask you for people that are not legal eagles that don’t have a great background in law. When you say she made them do a show cause, explain to us exactly what a show cause stay is.

[00:25:24.020] – Jacobs

So you would think that if someone walks into court and says, “Judge, this fact is the fact.” And it’s clearly not the fact,  just totally lies to the judge that the judge could then say, “You lied to me,” and do something about right. That’s the idea of the court’s inherent contempt powers. But they can’t just say, “Mr. Lovell, I find that you lied. I’m putting you in jail for six months,” because that’s not due process.

Due process is, “Well Mr. Lovell, I find probable cause to believe that you lied to me and I’m going to now issue what’s called an order to show cause,” this is the way it works in Florida. And you have to come for an arrangement like any criminal defendant. You’ve now been charged with a crime, and the crime you’ve been charged with is contempt of court.

And you have to plead guilty or not guilty. If you plead guilty, then there’ll be a sentencing. If you plead not guilty, there’ll be a trial. And this is all laid out in her order. And if you’re found guilty at trial, there’ll be a sentence. And after everyone presents all their mitigating aggravating factors, I will impose sentence. And once I’ve imposed sentence, you can then appeal that to the Third District Court of Appeals and see what they do about it. Right?

That’s what happens for anyone who’s charged with a crime. And these banks and their lawyer were charged with a crime. Contempt of court is a misdemeanor, a first-degree misdemeanor. So that is just a procedural process that was all followed to the T. Everything that was required by the law was done. And what happened was that Judge Butchko was setting up for the checkmate, which was we had a motion for sanctions.

When we were doing this trial and the evidence you’re hearing on the fraud and the Bank of New York Mellon testifies we don’t know about Bank of America and whether they are a service or not. Judge Butchko said, “This is a waste of time. This witness is a Carrington witness. He works for the sub servicer, and I want someone from Bank of America to testify.

I want someone from Bank of New York to testify about all these areas of fraud. There were like five different things that we had pointed out in the case that was fraud. The endorsement was a forgery, the assignment was fake. The mortgage’s own schedule was a phony. The affidavit in support of summary judgment that said there’s a check for accuracy in loan boarding process that was dishonest.

It was perjury. And also this whole statement about Bank of America was also perjury. Those are the five areas that we were supposed to get someone from the banks with knowledge to sit down and talk to us about. Either admit or deny. And they were ordered to do this. And Bank of America defied a subpoena to come in for deposition. Bank of New York never even gave us dates.

And we had a motion for sanctions that says, “Judge, they defied your order to give a deposition.” So now, under the sanctions rules is a rule that says, “You defy a court order to come in for depo (deposition), here’s what the judge can do. First thing is see that everything I was trying to prove is now admitted.” Say you’re not allowed to challenge anymore.

So all the fraud, those five areas of fraud were deemed admitted is what I was asking the judge to do. And once you have the admissions of the fraud, then she can grant the motion to vacate judgment due to fraud. She can strike the mortgage from clean hands.

She can issue another contempt proceeding that now puts Bank of New York Mellon Bank of America and their lawyers on blast for the much larger fraud of forging endorsements, putting in fake assignments, putting in fake mortgage loan schedules, lying in the affidavits in support of summary judgment and lying to the court in general. Right. That’s technique.

[00:28:56.580] – Grumbine

How many million should be in jail right now is just blowing me away.

[00:29:00.940] – Jacobs

The reality is that nobody went to jail. You go back to the Savings and Loan Crisis in the 80s, they had a thousand lawyers. That’s what Bill Black was talking about. There were people who went to prison for being dishonest. We have seen the largest securities fraud in the history of the United States, which was the run-up of this real estate bump that was all filling AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities with loans that were going to fail.

And they knew they were going to fail. And now we’ve seen multiple waves of foreclosure fraud and all of it without anyone really going to jail, without there ever being any accountability. And Judge Butchko, God bless her, has always said, “Like, not my courtroom. Don’t try that in front of me.”

So where we are now, what’s really gotten interesting is that in order to stop us from having this hearing, which would have supposed to be this past week, that would have blown everything up sky high. And now we would have really got into, like, so what are we going to do about this? We would have had some constitutional authority to do something about it, the banks ran up to the Third District Court of Appeals here in Miami.

And what was interesting is that my client, Miss Nicholas, is a patient American single mother who raised three young men in that home. She was a nurse. She worked doing home health nursing and made great money, had the ability to pay a mortgage. She basically fell into foreclosure because her company got audited for like three months, and by the time they finished the audit and started paying her again, she was behind in the mortgage.

And then she went into the Bank of America loan mod nightmare that was just sending package after package after package and temporary mod payment after temporary mod payment, thousands and thousands of dollars and eventually servicing gets transferred. And they start all over and nobody helps her.

And I came in right when they had already gotten the summary judgment of foreclosure, using the fake endorsement and the fake assignment and the affidavit that says that they checked the records for accuracy when they didn’t. And I was able to stop the title being transferred while we got into this whole fraud argument and spreading the evidence of that.

So now what’s happening is that Mr. Callahan, Nathan Callahan, so he’s a partner at Akerman, which is one of the most powerful firms in Florida and the sacred cows of their financial services appellate practice group just filed their response a week ago, and they asked the appellate court to hold Judge Butchko and me accountable, urgently hold us accountable because Judge Butchko rubber-stamped the order to show cause to falsely accuse Mr. Callahan of perjury, knowing that there was no factual basis for it, knowing that there was no due process for it.

And the reason they gave for why that happened, why Butchko would do that is that they claim that I, Bruce Jacobs, this lawyer with a couple of part-time lawyers and a few paralegals that has been slaving away in the courthouse in Miami for the last two decades, I hold special influence over Judge Butchko because I said so.

I said, “Judge Butchko, I want you to nail this guy with contempt charges because I don’t like him and he’s dishonest. And even though he’s a totally honest lawyer who never do anything wrong, I told you to do it right, Judge. You’re going to do it.”

[00:32:28.880] – Vaughan

So basically, there was a judge who wasn’t going to play ball and they’re going after her now.

[00:32:34.060] – Jacobs

And the crazy thing is that I was at the State Attorney’s office, she was like a division chief and I was just getting into felonies. I knew of her. I’ve never like socialized with or anything like that, but she’s been on the bench for almost two decades. She’s like, one of the leading circuit court judges in the state. She’s highly, highly respected. Google her name and you’ll see all kinds of interesting decisions that she’s made.

[00:33:08.910] – 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.

[00:34:03.460] – Vaughan

She’s proven how easily a bank or bank’s representatives could be held to account. It just seems like so insane that based on all the people that we know, all the people we’ve spoken to, all the different stories that we’ve collected that benefit almost never enures to the homeowner.

I guess what I’m trying to get to is that why is it that some parties can seem to lie with impunity? And it takes a very special case or almost a herculean effort for them to be called on it. While a person can walk into court with mountains of evidence and basically always get denied even the possibility of showing that – mass disparity.

[00:34:49.830] – Jacobs

I’ll tell you this. I have a client right now name Orelio Alvarez and another one named Ana Lazara Rodriguez. They are both Cuban American citizens in Miami. They’re both elderly, I think Alvarez is almost 70 and Ana Lazara is about 82. And Ana spent 19 years in Castro’s prison as a political prisoner. I mean, they call her a “plantadas” a planted one because they beat her; they tortured her; they deprived her of food; they deprived her of water, but they never broke her.

She was never going to give up. And when she finally was freed after 19 years, she moved to the states, settled in Miami, and she had a house that was left to her by one of the other prisoners that she was living with. And now she’s in her eighties, going blind from macro degeneration.

She cares for another former prisoner who is 81 and is dying of Alzheimer’s in the house. And I got involved because I read in the Miami Herald these stories about this Cuban Lady who losing her home to a foreclosure. And as soon as I got involved, I was like, yeah, this is one of these Bank of America fraud foreclosures. And I went to bat for her. I got in her case and we set it all up.

And Meanwhile, they ended up getting an emergency eviction order to evict her during a pandemic without ever addressing the fraud, just didn’t give us an opportunity to present the fraud. And in the Orelio Alvarez’s case, six years, I was filing pleading after pleading, motion after motion, saying there’s fraud here and they gave Bank of America summary judgment and never once let me present my evidence.

And you take that to an appellate court and the appellate court’s sole function. . . . It’s funny. In the Florida seal of the appellate court, there’s a Latin phrase called “sat cito si recte,” soon enough, it’s done correctly. That’s the whole point of having an appellate court, right. And what is the appellate court there to do but to make sure that everyone’s constitutional rights are protected, right?

Doesn’t matter about anything else. But we are here at an appellate court to make sure there is due process. If the banks are entitled to due process, so are the homeowners. And these are the guys who are supposed to protect it. And what’s been happening is that I have motions for stay of evictions because they’re trying to evict my clients on false evidence and we haven’t been able to present it.

And that gets denied. And then I get motions for stay from the bank saying “stay Judge Butchko from going forward,” and it gets granted. And it’s not just Judge Butchko. It’s Judge I, Judge Thomas, Judge Miller, like, there’s a lot of judges over the years who’ve been stayed and then ultimately blocked from adjudicating the fraud. And so the fraud is still here.

And I’m not going to get into why. My purpose, my job, like, what I’m hopeful is that people start to recognize what’s happening. They follow us, Bruce Jacobs. Follow me on Facebook. That’s where we’re constantly putting out updates and information. A lot of my hearings are on Zoom.

People have been joining them and watching them. We’ve gotten media attention because of it. And we’re telling people, “Call your Senators. Call your Congressman. Call whoever it is that you could think of whatever media people you can because we are creating a David versus Goliath fight, and my slingshot is the truth. My stone is the truth.

And as soon as that truth gets out, we can bring this all to a screeching halt.” I’ve always said it only takes one, takes one judge to get there. And Butchko so far has gotten the furthest. And now they’re after her. And it’s sad because what they’re accusing Butchko of doing if it’s true that she did what she did, that because some lawyer told her, I want you to follow this fake contempt charge against his other lawyer so he could be destroyed financially and professionally.

Then Judge Butchko should be disbarred. She should be removed from the bench and disbarred. But that is an intolerable thing to do. But if it’s not true and the lawyers just made that up, well, they’re impugning the integrity of a judge. And there’s a lawyer and they’re doing it in a way that lacks candor.

So if they lack candor and they are impugning the integrity of the court, I know that that is not acceptable because I, myself personally, had been defending myself in a bar trial for three years now because three years ago, the Thirds District Court of Appeals and another judge here in Miami named Judge Michael Hanzman accused me of lack of candor and impugning their integrity with reckless disregard for the truth.

And the truth is that we went to trial. I beat the lack of candor charges, but I never challenged the impugning the integrity of the court charges, just never did. Wouldn’t have been a good idea then, and frankly, I was willing to do whatever it is my lawyers said I screwed up. I got to fix it. Happy to fix it. And I volunteered for the Florida Lawyer’s Assistance Program.

I had Appellate Council reviewing all my pleadings, everything I could do to get myself out of harm’s way from this thing from three years ago where the Third District Court of Appeals and Judge Hanzman said I lacked candor and I impugned their integrity. But now we are three years later, and they’re saying that what she did was dishonest, and she did it for a dishonest motive.

And if that’s not true, there’s no evidence to back it up, which there is none. I think it’s funny. They’re saying I have some special hold over Judge Butchko, but in March when the Third District Court of Appeals sent me to the bar, they issued an opinion that was basically a public reprimand like it just talked about we have a long history between me and the Third DCA where they think I’m a dishonest person.

They think that I’m someone that keeps coming back and saying that what they’re doing is going to negatively impact the public perception of the courts’ ability to render meaningful justice. Because I filed all these pleadings that said that’s a reason for the whole court to get involved and look at this decision and change it because that’s a standard for en banc review.

And at the end of the day, the third said that I had to pay a fine sanction to HSBC because I had impugned the integrity of the court. So in a case where Judge Hanzman had a David Stern assignment of mortgage, which for all of you people who don’t know, David Stern was the robo signing king. He was the guy. And my whole defense was that’s unclean hands.

It’s in pleadings, my answer, affirmatives defenses said that is a fraud, that is a false document, and it’s unclean hands under the Supreme Court doctrine. We win the foreclosure. And during the trial, Judge Hanzman said, “I’m not going to follow Supreme Court Law. Take me up to the third DCA if you have a problem with that.” He said, “I don’t care if it’s David Stern or Howard Stern,” on the record.

And he said if I ask another question about the assignment during my cross-examination now I was at like question five at that point, “I’m going to hold you in contempt, and I’m going to throw you in jail,” and then denied a motion to disqualify him saying he had prejudged the case, which left me to go up to the appellate court and Judge Hanzman was right.

It did not end well for me. But 2018 is when they ordered that I had to pay this up to $5,000 attorneys fee award to HSBC. And in May of 2021, just a few months ago, Judge Butchko was the judge who heard that evidence here on the amount of fees and gave HSBC every single penny they asked for $4,665.50. Didn’t knock off a dime. So this is clearly not a judge who’s beholden to me.

[00:42:41.830] – Lovell

Right.

[00:42:43.670] – Jacobs

Like she didn’t help me at all.

[00:42:45.720] – Lovell

Right. I gotta jump in here. Okay, so I feel like I’ve gotta center myself. We’ve been on a very long journey, and our team at Steve Grumbine has just been so kind to help bring in his universe in a platform to bring this truth to the American people. Because what Eric and I have been in the midst of, Bruce, is I like so many of your clients got caught in the crosshairs of this thing, but I didn’t have the tenacity, ironically, because I am very tenacious, but I didn’t have the tenacity to fight this out in the courts because it’s a function of money and time and effort.

And I was just like, I just know I was fighting a losing battle from the beginning, but I am a producer, so I figured I could try to pull on some threads and figure some things out, which led me to William K. Black. I knew this thing didn’t make sense, Bruce, right from

[00:43:32.640] – Jacobs

Yeah.

[00:43:32.640] – Lovell

So where we started with our story, and I know that Eric, you’ll probably smile when I consider this moment, but we started where you are at this moment, 13 years. Well, this last version, I mean, this has been 13 years in the making. But ultimately, I was starting out in that position where I was like dealing with servicers. It didn’t make sense. I was getting the shuffle.

It turned out that was like the whole dual tracking. And that led me into the whole variety of everything the servicers were. And I had to reconfigure my entire paradigm to understand how any of this was possible, which led us to William K. Black, which taught us control fraud. The great financial crisis is the third act of what he was able to put in check based on the S & L Crisis like you said earlier in this dialog.

But as it comes to you, I was so struck by this thing that’s happening in the courts where you’ve got all the evidence. We’ve known for years the volume of what you’re talking about, but yet these judges have been able to hold it back and operate the way you just described. In our world, we were able to literally piece together every element of this crime. Okay.

And we built it from the ground up. Like you just said, an elderly African American woman in Akron, Ohio, who through her tragedy opened up literally a miracle that we discovered. But she ended up shooting herself because she was a victim of all of this stuff, plus potentially straw buying. And that’s another side of the story. But we put this whole thing together from the ground up.

And this is what Steve has been in the midst of. And this is the whole idea of The New Untouchables because we got into appraisal fraud and what the lenders were doing and perverse incentives. And then we’ve moved up the food chain to the CEOs and how they pulled off the crime, but we haven’t been able to get to the cover-up yet even though we’ve got 300 plus hours of footage from across the country that is basically saying exactly what you’re telling us from all over the country – California to New York, Florida, to Washington and everywhere in between and Hawaii.

And we’ll get to that in a second. But what I’m trying to bring this thing full circle is we put season one of The Con in front of some of the most important gatekeepers in the United States at HBO, at Netflix, at Amazon all of these different huge platforms, and these gatekeepers act to us like the judges do to you. Like get the truth out there. Can’t let anybody know what’s going on. Okay.

So we are working the way we have to. And I’ll bring this full circle because it’s very important that I touch upon this because we discovered the only RICO conviction in the entire United States that was basically a microcosm of everything that you’re talking about. And we found in Ohio through a needle in a haystack because we opened up the door through Addie Polk’s tragedy to this discovery that they actually did their job.

The Summit County Task Force, led by AG Marc Dann at that time, put together the damn task force to discover what they were doing and what they ended up doing because they’re one of three states that can actually do criminal investigations at the AG level, California, New York being the other, they got a RICO conviction, which they were also talking to the FBI to try to make this happen.

But mid-level players at the FBI didn’t take it to the top. And this whole thing with political appointees got in the mix because, of course, like you said earlier, the banks have so much influence, the financial institutions have so much influence in our government that has been able to suppress what you’re talking about. How come RICO isn’t something that I feel like since we discovered it.

And I’ve got information about season two that I’ve got it from on high from the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and everything else, though we haven’t had an opportunity to reveal. But RICO comes to mind is something when you describe this stuff. Can you kind of parse that to me in your words . . .

[00:47:13.020] – Jacobs

It’s clearly RICO to commit fraud on the court – that’s mail fraud, that’s wire fraud, that’s obstruction of justice if you and your lawyers are doing it. Yeah, I believe that that’s RICO. That’s what we’re working on in Hawaii. We’re going to talk about that in a second, but I just want people to understand this is timeless, right?

This is how it’s always been done. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. If you follow that story, Hans Christian Andersen said that there was an Emperor who was defrauded by a couple of scammers who said, “We can make you the most beautiful clothes. And they’ll be so amazing that the only people who won’t be able to appreciate are the ones who are either unfit for their jobs or too stupid to know.”

So everyone the story goes on is all falling all over themselves to comment on how beautiful the clothes are and these scammers are making all this money. And meanwhile, the Emperor has no clothes. It’s all a scam. There’s nothing there. And even after that innocent child says the Emperor has no clothes, and the whole town finally starts laughing. All the people start laughing.

According to the end of the fable, the Emperor and his nobles continue to hold the train on high as if it’s still there. So what is that saying? Like, obviously to us as laypeople and people who have been involved and touched by this in one way or another, we understand the Constitution supposed to protect us from this kind of stuff.

I met yesterday with the FBI and the US Attorney’s office, and I have been talking to them for months and just spent another hour sitting with people who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, who are looking at me like this is all brand new. And I sent an email this morning saying, you know, what? Can I just speak to Merrick Garland directly?

Like, I’d like a meeting with Merrick Garland. He’s the US attorney. This is not going to be decided by some low-level FBI agent whether they’re going to take on Bank of America and Chase for defying the national mortgage homes. That’s going to get decided from on high and from the Biden administration. And here’s what I’ll say. I think that right now.

I’ve been following politics for a long time. I was a Bernie Sanders delegate at the 2016 convention. I watched the rise of Trump, and I think that most of the people that support Trump do it for the same reason that I supported Bernie because we know that there’s a problem in the government right now and they’re not promoting the general welfare and everyone’s in trouble because there’s so much inequality and things going wrong in the government we’re not fixing.

And I think that when you look at where we stand today, God willing, this administration, which is still forming, they’re still putting in their head of the OCC, and the head of these different departments that will get a chance to show whether they are willing to do something about it. But if we really want to do anything, Teddy Roosevelt took on JP Morgan 100 years ago as a Republican because he was saying that these guys with all their money and power can’t be more powerful than the government, and that’s what we see today.

So I think that, yes, the problem with RICO is that you have to have a prosecutor willing to prosecute it, and you need to have a judge willing to allow the case to proceed on the merits. And my journey has been, I, thankfully, have all these judges to choose from. And Judge Butchko, God bless her, has always said, “I don’t care who you are. You’re in my courtroom and you’re committing fraud. I’m going to hold you accountable. We’re gonna create, like, a real case.”

[00:50:58.830] – Lovell

I got to ask this question to Steve, because Mr. Grumbine, having experienced The Con and now The New Untouchables, might you think that the one thing that let’s say prosecutor with the integrity or a judge with the integrity willing to look at, for example, the evidence.

And I say this in light of looking at Bruce in front of the Supreme Court, who we know just was listening to Goldman Sachs against the Arkansas Teachers Pension Union and the Plumbers and Pipefitters of America Unions based on presumption upon the court, which they are not looking at the evidence. Where do you think they might be able to find the evidence of this massive, massive crime, Mr. Grumbine?

[00:51:36.910] – Grumbine

It might be Richard Bowen, and it might be at Real Progressives. We got all that stuff on our site, but honest to God, top to bottom, between the work you guys have done at The Con and our work here. We have brought all of this out.

There’s absolutely no reason other than cowardice not to take this on or which is what I think it really is, corruption. And you go back even further. I really like what he said. There’s two Americas, basically. There’s those that live above the rules, and then there’s the rest of us. And these people, they’re protected somehow or another they’re protected.

[00:52:16.660] – Lovell

Steve, can you remind us what you’re an expert in?

[00:52:19.040] – Grumbine

I am an expert, a lay expert, in macroeconomics.

[00:52:24.090] – Lovell

And how does that fit in terms of Fed policy?

[00:52:26.640] – Grumbine

So the Federal Reserve is the nation’s bank, and our government has the ability to create dollars every day that Congress says, “Here’s a bill. Let’s spend.” New money is spent into the economy. And because of the Fed’s extreme powers to be able to maintain equilibrium, they are able to buy bad debt, put it on their books, provide liquidity to banks, and they could do it to regular people if we had accounts at the Fed, but they don’t.

They do it for Wall Street. They do it for all these other groups. They take their bad debt off, put it on their books, and they allow them to continue as if nothing really happened at all. And so, by extension . . . [crosstalk 00:53:09]

[00:53:09.800] – Lovell

Based on what you’ve learned from our collective efforts, can you say now, with a little bit, maybe more clarity than you might have prior to us coming together on this and then define it and then articulate it so that your audience understands what we’re talking about here.

[00:53:25.600] – Grumbine

So ultimately, it starts at the very bottom. It starts at the very top. This is a systemic problem of cover-up, of corruption through and through at the most basic level. Bill Black says the best way to rob a bank is to own one. And so the CEOs create these perverse incentives to make the people below them give bad loans.

They know the CEOs as they collect their bonuses, they know full well that they’re never going to be around when those bad loans collapse. So they provide huge bonus structures for these bad loans. And then it goes down to the next layer with the appraisers because the appraisers want to get their work done.

So they hire the appraiser and appraisers then give them the kind of appraisal that they want. But then it goes even further down because of the way that they record the deeds and all the other paperwork. And so they have these chop shops that create this garbage paperwork.

[00:54:26.860] – Lovell

Where do they unload it? They unload it on pensions?

[00:54:29.260] – Grumbine

Unload it on pensions. They financialized the whole thing. They create these synthetic CDOs to buy bad debt and then package it up again and resell it as even more bad debt. And voila, we have another collapse. They’re really backstopped by fraud.

[00:54:48.430] – Jacobs

We’re right now going to go into millions and millions of people facing foreclosure and eviction, not just from landlord tenant issues, but from not being able to pay their mortgages. I still believe you have JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America had $1.5 trillion apiece back in ’08 when they crashed the economy.

Now they have $3 trillion apiece 10 years later. And if they’re engaged in criminal activity, they’re supposed to get punished. And my hope is we know the past. We know the history. We’re never going to prosecute that to success. We didn’t prosecute all kinds of obvious, terrible things that have happened for decades now.

But we have a chance right now to call attention to what’s happening here. And we have a judge that planted her flag, her American flag in her courtroom. She planted it and said, “Not in my courtroom.” And that is something that we should be supporting and trying to draw attention to.

[00:55:56.460] – Vaughan

How do we as a public support judges that are doing good work and challenge the courts when it appears that they might not be?

[00:56:05.560] – Jacobs

So to me, this is all about getting this into the media and getting this into the hands of the politicians and the prosecutors who need to know that people care about this. I was shocked when my meeting with the US Attorney’s office and the FBI yesterday, one of the prosecutors asked me, “But where is the harm to the investors from this fraud?”

That was her primary concern. Where is the harm to the investors? And my response to her was, “Well, there is no harm if you just let them commit fraud.” But the question isn’t about harm to the investor. The question is where is the harm to the American people who are being denied their constitutional rights and being deprived of their property by these frauds and foreclosures?

What about the harm to the integrity of the US Department of Justice and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, that they could order a bank to do something, and the bank could defy that order before the ink is even dry, where they’re promising. . . Imagine how many people of color that were prosecuted by the Feds and were put into a sentencing agreement that said, if you cooperate and you agree not to commit any more crimes, we will reduce your sentence to something like $25 billion, the equivalent of that to the bank, which is a slap on the wrist.

And then you find out that the guy was still dealing drugs the whole time, like the US Attorney’s office would nail that guy to the wall as a sign to everybody else. But this is the Chicken Shit Club. There’s a book called “The Chicken Shit Club.” This would be a fight to be an epic fight.

I know I’ve been in it for a long, long time, but if I can do it, I’m not even that great of a lawyer. I’m just someone who really believes that when I swear to protect my clients’ Constitutional rights I’ll go to the door to do that. I’ll put myself at risk, too, but it’s got to have integrity. I got to believe in what I’m doing. But right now, this is not going to happen on a local level.

This is a national problem. This is a national situation that has reared its ugly head just as a new administration is taking on. And I’ll give props where I see it, whether you’re for Biden or against him. I don’t know. I don’t care. I was a Bernie guy like I said, but I see Biden bringing in help for people in foreclosure.

I see Biden trying to beef up the antimonopoly, the anti-trust actions that they’re going to happen to take on the banking industry. I think that if you really want to break up the big banks catch them being criminal enterprises, and you can do that as a matter of law. And all it takes is the people creating this power. So I wanted to make sure we got to Hawaii because I think that the Hawaiians to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Hawaii. I’ve been twice. I love that place. It’s like a little slice of heaven. And one of the things I love about it are the Hawaiian people themselves, which now I’ve gotten to know much better their culture and how things are working for them, because in Hawaii, I was contacted by a guy by the name of Ian Chan Hodges and I had been invited by him to get involved.

So Ian contacted me a couple of years ago, he read about a CNBC article that was talking about how I had a Judge Bronwyn Miller here in Miami who’s now in the Third District Court of Appeals. There was proof that the Bank of America ordered one of their vendors to destroy nearly two billion records in violation of subpoenas for those records.

And they were committing fraud in the court and defying her orders for discovery. And what happened was that he read the story on CNBC and he called me from Hawaii. And now it’s two years later, three years later, almost, and we are working tirelessly towards bringing this fight to Hawaii. So Hawaii gets involved because the Nation of Hawaii, the people that are Native Hawaiians, remember, they lived in that island.

They ruled the island themselves, and there is Hawaiian law that has now become, you could find cases from the courts that were under the Hawaiian government. And once we took over Hawaii, these people were made citizens, but they weren’t treated like citizens, right? So they were being discriminated against disgustingly.

And Bank of America was particularly in Hawaii, was redlining the native Hawaiians for years going back to the ’80s, ’90s, like you couldn’t get a loan from Bank of America to buy a house if you were Native Hawaiian because they were discriminating against. So these Native Hawaiians, the Capuna, the elders, took on the Kuliana, the obligation to fight back in ’94 it started.

And they went to the OCC what was the OCC back then, and they said, “These guys red lined us. Don’t let them merge into this Bank of Hawaii. Don’t let them do the merger.” And they blocked it until the bank agreed. Okay, fine. We’re going to give you guys $150,000,000 in special FHA 247 loans. You guys are going to be able to start building houses.

And if they have given a thousand homes at that time, if they had built a thousand homes with that $150,000,000, that’d be 1000 Hawaiian families today that would be owning property, and property today is, on average, about a million dollars a home in Hawaii. Right. And sure enough, Bank of America got the merger and then didn’t issue the loans.

They gave out like $13 million of loans in the first four years by the deadline. So ’98 starts and they want to merge now with another one. It was a Nation’s Bank merger. And the Hawaiians blocked it again. So you guys defied the commitment to the OCC that you were going to give us these loans. So they flew out Bank of America senior level people, and they had a whole fanfare that they were going to honor the commitment they promised.

And they were going to also help fund a National Bank for the Native Hawaiians to be owned by the Native Hawaiians. So imagine what a bank from 20 years ago would be worth today. I mean, you’re talking about generational wealth, about native Hawaiians today who are predominantly unemployed, homeless, suffering from drug and alcohol addiction, all kinds of other problems that come from poverty, right.

For the next 20 years, my friend Ian Chan Hodges, and there’s the people from the Nation of Hawaii had been carrying this fight. And everywhere they go, you have Bank of America show up with their lobbyists and their lawyers to say, “What commitment? We never made a commitment. Oh, you mean $150,000,000 endeavor, the $150,000,000 suggestion, the goal, the vision.

It wasn’t an OCC commitment because that has legal ramifications. Anything else? Oh, but don’t worry. We honored that commitment. We took care of that.” And there was always [inaudible 01:03:08] give a minimum ever to care of. And they went into federal court just last year, December and sued the County of Maui saying, “Bank of America, we honored our commitment where there never was a commitment.”

And this is ultimately like what I’m trying to do now is I’m trying to build a fight that we can actually win based on the work that I’ve been doing for years, connecting it to Hawaii because in Hawaii, the Supreme Court of Hawaii has twice said, “Bank of America, this is wrongful and deceptive.”

And in Hawaii, there was a couple of Native Hawaiian farmers who sued the DuPont Company, chemical company, 20 years ago because the DuPont Company was selling a product that was killing the crops. And they knew it was killing the crops. And yet all over the country, they’re getting sued and they were saying, “We didn’t know,” until it came out that they did now.

And these native Hawaiians in Hawaii sued under RICO. And that’s what it’s going to take. You can file whatever you want in any court you want around the country, but you’re going to get a judge assigned to you. And that judge is either going to make the decision that they want to take on the fight that you’re taking on, or they’re not going to take on that fight.

And you need the perfect case with the perfect clients in front of the perfect judge to make the miracle happen. So that’s the work that I do. That’s what I’ve been carrying. And again, like what you guys can do to help is just raise awareness. Just get media to call me to follow up with what we’re doing. Keep doing these shows, keep making it go viral because eventually it’s going to get into the hand of somebody who’s going to say, “Yeah, he’s right.”

And then Judge Butchko is going to do what she does, and they’re going to fight every chance they can take her out too. But that’s how you win this fight is you find the right path, and eventually you get to the decision makers who can do something about it. And that’s where we are.

[01:05:11.680] – Lovell

Look, this whole thing is insane and our mentor, Bill Black always says it’s not genius, it’s audacity. And Bruce and everybody listening, and Steve and Eric, what our goal at this time is, ultimately, we’ve got a muster a civil rights like movement of the millions upon millions of people that have been on the downside of this incredible carnage that has destroyed lives, literally in this conversation, Hawaii to Florida, but really, all over the world.

I get contacted by people from Australia and Sweden. People going, “Oh, my God. Now I understand what happened.” And in the United States, my friends, we’ve got to create a civil rights-like movement to purge corruption, whether it’s RICO and the cases of what Bruce is working on, how we got to flush these things out. We just need massive, massive awareness.

And quite frankly, Steve, we’ve got The Con, and we’ve got The New Untouchables to help germinate and populate. And Bruce, I promise you, we are in the midst of bringing as many journalists to your story. I have got a ton of amazing contacts. We’ll be in touch with that. But I got to turn it back over to you, Steve. Close us out. Tell us what you’re thinking, buddy.

[01:06:21.360] – Grumbine

I was with Jordan Chariton, formerly of TYT on Status Coup, and we talked about the evictions that are going on during the Pandemic and a little bit about the fraud and corruption. And he is very interested in this as well. Mike Figueredo of the Humanist Report is very interested in this as well. There are a few people out there that are actually trying to do good journalism, good investigative journalism that are willing to take a risk and take a chance and put this stuff out there.

I really got to tell you, for those listening, this is the most important thing going on right now because things that I care about as a MMT economist light, if you will, we’re trying to bring about a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and there’s so much fraud and corruption, and we’ve got mountains of evidence of the whole system in the way it operates through this fraud scheme and the mortgages, things that Bruce has brought up, things that you’ve heard throughout our series.

And this is our Waterloo. This is where we have to fight, throw down the gauntlet and not back down. And we need to bring every one of us into this fight because without this, there is no politics that we can count on. There is no legal system that we can count on. Our media is corrupt and bought off by five major corporations, and it’s in our hands. We have got to organize around this and we’ve got to take direct action and bring about the stuff into each one of our media outlets, write to our congressmen, write to our senators.

And we’re trying to create this civil rights-like movement to purge corruption. If you go to our website at realprogressives.org, go underneath The New Untouchables. You’ll find a place to sign up, a place where people who have been affected by this can sign up. Where your stories can be told. And we’re looking for you to come with us. And Bruce, I know you’re looking to have people come . . . So where can we find your work?

[01:08:19.180] – Jacobs

So, Bruce Jacobs, Esq. is my Facebook page. I’m on Twitter with the same handle. We are also going to JakeLegal.com, J-A-K-ELegal.com is my website, and our work is going to hopefully be in the media more and more and more. You’re right. It is the Waterloo. It is the Alamo. It is the fight.

If they’re able to wipe out the next wave of homeowners during a pandemic with fake foreclosures, then we kind of lost and we lost our country. And that’s the real fight. It’s not a Republican versus Democrat thing. It is the one-percenters versus the rest of us because they’re the ones that have all the money and power and that small segment of the population that lives by different set laws.

That’s where I’m focusing on is making sure that we hold everyone accountable to law and that we use all the resources that we have like the media and the government to fight back and protect our property. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing as patriots.

[01:09:21.900] – Grumbine

Thank you so much for your time today. Eric and Patrick, as always, thanks for joining me and Bruce, it was a pleasure getting to know you. We look forward to working with you in the future. This is an army we’re building right now, folks. Small but tenacious. Absolutely committed. We’ll hope you’ll join us because this is going to affect somebody you know and love probably right next door. Have a good day, everybody. We’re out.

[01:09:48.720] – 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 Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to The New Untouchables, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Bruce Jacobs’ website

Judge Beatrice Butchko

RICO

Chain of Title by David Dayen

Ocwen Loan Servicing

Nathaniel Callahan

AM 200 law firms

Ana Lazara Rodriguez Foreclosure

RICO

OCC Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

The Chicken Shit Club

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